Falling In (2 page)

Isabelle slowed to admire the latest crop of fifth-grader artwork hanging on the wall between Ms. Palmer and Mr. Wren’s classrooms and took a moment to peer into the cafeteria, which seemed to her a more cheerful place at nine thirty in the morning than when it was overtaken by screaming kids and yellow trays still steaming from the dishwasher. Reaching the door to Vice Principal Closky’s outer office, she decided a short rest was in order. She enjoyed her visits with the vice principal, but resting now would serve in the long run to delay her return to Mrs. Sharpe’s classroom.

The hallway’s gray linoleum felt cool beneath her legs, which Isabelle had stretched out in front
of her so she could examine her boots. She’d found them the day before in a pile of junk set out for the garbage collectors. Isabelle couldn’t resist picking through roadside junk, much to her mother’s dismay. She’d made loads of good finds over the years, including a bike with a bent tire that had only taken two good thwacks of a hammer to restore to its proper alignment, and a goldfish, still very much alive, swimming in a goldfish bowl. Although her mother had a strict no-pets policy, Isabelle had been able to effectively argue that fish weren’t pets, since you couldn’t actually pet them.

The boots had been stuffed under the cushion of a crumbling Barcalounger. They were women’s red leather lace-up boots, shiny and new-looking, flat heeled with surprisingly pointy toes. Isabelle’s feet had grown two sizes over the past summer, and the boots fit her nicely once she’d stuffed some toilet paper in them. And while it would be hard to argue that they in any way matched her current outfit of a hooded gray sweater and loose jeans, Isabelle felt that her boots somehow completed her.

She looked up when she heard giggling voices floating down the hallway. Two girls in gym suits walked toward her—or rather, one was walking and the other was limping, her arm flung around the other girl’s shoulder as if to steady herself. Isabelle recognized the limping girl as Charley Bender.

If you had to see somebody in the hallway, Charley Bender wasn’t so bad, Isabelle supposed. She wasn’t exactly Isabelle’s cup of tea, but she was okay for the kind of girl who was usually picked third or fourth for games in PE, who stuttered a bit at the beginning of class presentations but calmed down after a minute or two and was only halfway boring on the topic of the Major Domestic Imports of Southern Lithuania.

But Isabelle had noticed that Charley Bender was one of the few people at school who said hello to Morris Kranhopf, a boy who had to wear a shoe with a special raised heel, because his left leg was shorter than his right. And so she guessed that Charley was decent for someone who was as average as an apricot.

(Were apricots average? Isabelle wondered. Better make that apples. Or acorns.)

“Is the nurse in?” Charley called to her, as though Isabelle were the receptionist. “I need her to wrap up my ankle. Gopher hole.”

“Gopher hole what?” Isabelle asked. “Gopher hole who?”

“She stepped in a gopher hole, birdbrain,” Charley’s helper said. “She’s lucky she didn’t break her ankle.”

Lucky,
Isabelle mouthed to herself. Now that was the truth. Girls like Charley Bender were usually lucky, in her experience. Why was that? Where other people would have broken five bones in their foot, the Charley Benders of the world only twisted their ankle. They were forever reaching the doorway just as the rain began to pour from the sky, or jumping onto the curb only seconds before the speeding car rounded the corner. What fairies stood over the cradle and cast their lucky spells the day Charley Bender was born?

“So, have you seen the nurse?” Charley asked again.

“I’m not here to see the nurse,” Isabelle replied.

Charley sighed. “Maybe I’ll just check for myself.” She poked her head into the doorway one door down from the principal’s office.

“Is she there?” her friend asked. “Because Mr. Lasso said I had to get right back to class, but I guess I could wait with you if the nurse isn’t there.”

“Not there,” Charley reported. “But I can wait by myself. I don’t mind.”

Not needing any further encouragement, her friend turned and trotted back down the hallway. Charley Bender disappeared into the nurse’s office, and Isabelle resumed admiring her red boots.

A sudden squeak followed by a piercing squeal punctured Isabelle’s reveries. Both noises came from the nurse’s office. Isabelle was sure the squeal had issued forth from the mouth of Charley Bender, but where had the squeak come from?

Intrigued, she decided to investigate.

But first, something more about Isabelle Bean.

(What? You’re ready to get on with the story? You hate it when a story gets started and then slows to a complete halt? Me too. I totally sympathize. But this will only take a second—two seconds at most—I promise. Trust me.)

You know her, of course. Isabelle Bean is the girl who sits in the back corner of the classroom near the pencil sharpener. She isn’t invisible, exactly, but she might as well be. She hardly ever speaks unless spoken to (and then only in riddles), never makes eye contact, has bangs that hang down almost to her nose so even if somebody wanted to look her straight in the eye, they couldn’t.

It goes without saying that very few people want to look Isabelle Bean straight in the eye.

It’s not that she smells bad. She doesn’t. She takes a bath every night. And it’s not that she’s dumb, although it’s true she has a bad habit of not doing her homework except when she really feels like it, which is almost never.

And it’s not that Isabelle Bean is a bully. She’s never beaten anyone up or even made the smallest threat. No one is physically scared of her, except for a few of the very nice girls in Mrs. Sharpe’s class, girls whose hair smells like apple blossoms and whose mothers still read them bedtime stories. These are the girls who sharpen their pencils at home so they never have to walk near Isabelle’s desk.

There’s a barely visible edge of otherworldliness to Isabelle, a silver thread that runs from the top of her head to the bottom bump of her spine. It frightens other children away. They’re afraid that if they sit too close, the thread will weave itself into their hair and pull them into dark places they can’t find their way out of. A girl named Jenna claimed it
reached out to grab her one day as she walked up the aisle on her way to recess, but she had her scissors in her pocket (don’t ask why) and nipped it before it could entangle her.

A girl who sits in the back corner, a girl who is as silent as a weed, a girl who everyone stays away from as though she were contagious. No friends, of course. Oh, there was that one back in second grade, the one who always came to school with yesterday’s dirt still underneath her nails, but that didn’t last long. The other girls stole her away. It was a game they liked to play, Keep Away from Isabelle. Rules: Leave one girl (that weird Isabelle Bean) outside so other girls (everybody else) can congratulate themselves for being inside. Old news, old news.

By the time Isabelle reached third grade, she had given up on friendship. She’d grown tired of sending birthday party invitations to children who never RSVP’d, much less appeared at her door on the given date with brightly wrapped packages in their hands. She’d given up making persimmon cookies to bring to school, where the other children called
them Cootie Cookies and refused to eat them. She’d given up handing out Valentines stenciled with pictures of beating, winged hearts. She’d even given up smiling at girls who seemed shy and in need of a friend themselves.

What she never gave up: Telling herself jokes and laughing under her breath. Memorizing the letters she found in her alphabet soup and rearranging them into stories.

And she never gave up hope. She always kept a tiny sliver of it in her right pocket. Just in case it might come in handy someday.

Up until the moment of the squeal and the squeak, it had been a dull year for Isabelle.

Now, when it came to Isabelle and school, dull was not always bad. Dull meant you were left to yourself, generally ignored, not fully acknowledged by your classmates to exist. And there were benefits to this. When other children started paying attention to Isabelle, they often took her the wrong way.

Just the week before, Truma DeStefano had been standing behind Isabelle in the cafeteria line when she noticed a strange light snaking around Isabelle’s legs. “Isabelle is wrapped up in supernatural spirits,” she whispered to her best friend, Casey Weathervane, pointing to the shimmering light. “She’s a ghost magnet!”

Casey, being on the high-strung side, let out a shriek that caused one of the cafeteria ladies to drop a ten-gallon pot of chili in the middle of the kitchen, which in turn provoked a swarm of swear words that the children usually only heard at home when their fathers were watching their favorite football teams blow a big game. A gaggle of lunchroom monitors came running, and Casey and Truma pointed at Isabelle’s legs, where the light still hovered ominously. Isabelle stood very still, like a small animal cornered by a pack of snarling dogs.

Mrs. Wigglestaff, the most seasoned of the lunchroom monitors, sighed. “It’s the light bouncing,” she told the girl. She motioned to the overhead lights, then tilted her head toward the dishwasher’s steel door. “Bounce, bounce, bounce,” she said, her finger tracking the path of the light from ceiling to dishwasher to the spot where Isabelle just happened to be standing.

Truma and Casey giggled, but uttered not one word of apology to Isabelle, not one careless
“Whoops!” It was Isabelle Bean, after all. One did not actually direct comments toward Isabelle Bean unless one absolutely had to.

No, on the whole, Isabelle preferred her school days event free. Dull was good. Dull meant her thoughts could roam here and there, uninterrupted. But even Isabelle had to admit that sometimes dull was, well, kind of dull. A momentary interjection of a squeak and a squeal wasn’t a bad thing, she decided as she poked her head into the nurse’s office to see what Charley Bender was going on about.

Charley was standing on a chair in the corner. “I don’t usually yell when I see mice,” she said sheepishly when she saw Isabelle in the doorway. “I’m really not afraid of mice.”

“But are mice afraid of you?” Isabelle walked into the room and leaned against the sink, prepared to be disappointed by Charley’s reply. Girls like Charley Bender never had good answers to riddles, especially riddles that had no answers.

“I don’t think this one was,” Charley said. “He
looked me straight in the eye, like he wanted to say something to me, ask me a question. It sort of spooked me, if you want to know the truth.”

“Of course I want to know the truth,” Isabelle replied. “What else would I want to know? A trunk full of lies?”

Well, actually, now that you mention it, Isabelle didn’t mind lies, as long as they were interesting lies that didn’t get anyone hurt. But she suspected Charley Bender was a truth teller from way back. Charley Bender looked like a rose petal fresh from its morning bath. Rose petals were notoriously poor liars.

Hopping gingerly down from the chair and limping past Isabelle, Charley made her way to the closet on the far side of the room. “He looked at me, I yelled, and he disappeared into here. There must be a mouse hole in there or something. My dad says this is the time of year when mice start building nests inside, so they have a safe place to have their babies. There’s one that lives in our attic all spring.”

Isabelle came and stood next to her. “Maybe he needed a Band-Aid,” she said. “Maybe he was out playing mouse soccer and fell into an ant hole.”

Charley Bender rolled her eyes at Isabelle. Girls like Charley Bender were always rolling their eyes at Isabelle. It was because they never knew whether or not she was kidding. But why would she kid about mice? Why couldn’t a mouse play soccer? Or paint a picture? Or start up a small business selling cheese crackers and Cat-B-Gone spray? She supposed their tails might get in the way on the soccer field, and that as a species they might not have a head for business, but that didn’t push these ideas out of the realm of possibility.

Isabelle put her hand on the doorknob. “Maybe there’s a whole mouse country right inside this closet, did you ever think of that? Mice families, mice swimming pools, mice courthouses where the mice go to settle their disputes.”

When Charley only nodded, Isabelle continued, enjoying this riff on the life of
mus domesticus
, the beloved house mouse. “Yes, I believe I’d like to visit
the country of Mice. I’ll try to be back by lunch-time, but if I’m not, save one perfect french fry for me, would you?” And with that, she twisted the doorknob—