Me and Fat Glenda (6 page)

Glenda was still trying to guess D when the front doorbell rang. “Come with me,” she said. “It's probably somebody selling something.”

We went to the living room, and Glenda tried to peek out the window first to see who was there. There didn't seem to be anyone so she opened the door wide to look out. The next thing we knew something came flying into the room, something big and white that swirled over our heads in a loop exactly as though it was alive.

“What is that thing? Get it!” Glenda shrieked. The front door was still wide open and outside I thought I heard the sound of boys' voices laughing and hooting.

Glenda made a wild leap to catch the flying, white whatever-it-was as it nosedived toward an end table with a lamp and a lot of small china and glass knickknacks on it. As Glenda and I both swooped toward the lamp, my foot caught in one of the table legs which turned outward. Glenda tripped over my foot, and the next minute there was a terrific thud followed immediately by an awful crash!

I had managed to pull away and catch my balance just in time. But Glenda hadn't. She, the lamp table, and knickknacks were all in a terrible tangle on the floor. And everything seemed to be broken. Everything, that is, except Glenda. Suddenly a head appeared in the doorway. He was a kid, about our age, with light brown hair and eyeglasses and a laugh like a braying donkey.

Glenda looked up in a blaze of recognition. “Roddy Fenton!” she screeched. “I'll kill you! I'll brain you! So help me, I'll break your head!” To my amazement, Glenda
scrambled to her feet in an instant and rushed out of the house. I watched her from the doorway, puffing her way down the street after him, still screaming, “I'll brain you, Roddy Fenton! I'll kill you. . . . I will, I will! So help me!”

I stood there in Glenda's mother's decorator-decorated living room and wondered what to do. There was so much broken stuff all over, I felt like somebody waiting for the ambulance to arrive and afraid to touch the wounded in case of doing more damage.

Suddenly my eye fell on the white “thing” that had come soaring into the room. It was lying among the broken bric-a-brac. I reached down and picked it up and saw that it was nothing but a paper airplane, but a very cleverly constructed one. I began to unfold it to see how it was made and I realized there was writing in it.

At first the printed-out words didn't make sense. Then they did. They were in verse form and here's what they said:

To the new girl . . . .

Somebody fat

Killed a cat.

You'll find out

She's a rat.

WATCH OUT!

I was still standing there in Glenda's living room, holding the note in my hand, when I heard Glenda's feet scraping
tiredly up the front steps. I folded up the paper plane very small and pushed it deep down into the pocket of my dungarees.

Glenda staggered into the living room and flopped down in one of the soft plushy chairs. She was beet-red and dripping with sweat.

I sat down opposite her.

“Did you catch him?”

“Of course not.”

She began rubbing her fists into her eyes. At first I thought she was just rubbing them and then I saw she was crying. She was a terrible sight. I was pretty upset about the note and what it said, but still I went over to her and offered her a wrinkled-up tissue from my shirt pocket.

She shook her head and took out a lavender-colored one, neatly folded, from her own pocket. She began wiping her face hard with it, trying to make out that the whole thing was sweat instead of a mixture of sweat and tears, like it really was.

“Gee, what a mess,” she said after awhile, looking across at the toppled-over end table. “I shouldn't even be sitting here. I'll get this chair all damp and filthy. My mother'll have a fit. Oh boy, that lamp's broken for sure. What are we going to do?”

“I'm sorry I got in your way, Glenda. I guess I made you fall.”

“Oh, it doesn't matter,” she said miserably. “I'd have probably broken the stuff anyway.”

The message in the note was really bothering me but I couldn't bring myself right then and there to ask Glenda if she'd been the one to leave the dead cat on our doorstep. Was Glenda a sneak? Or was Roddy Fenton a liar? How could I tell? I didn't know him at all—and I didn't even know Glenda very well.

“What's this kid Roddy Fenton like?” I asked her, as we carefully picked up pieces and tried to put things back as close as we could to the way they had been.

“Oh, I don't want to talk about him,” she said, lowering her head over the debris.

“Well, has he been living in the neighborhood a long time?” I asked hesitantly.

“Oh yeah. Since always. Look,” she said, raising her head—I could see she was even redder than before. “This kid's a troublemaker. He's made a lot of trouble for me. He turned all the kids around here against me. That's why I've got no friends in this neigh—” She stopped abruptly. “What was that thing he threw in here anyway?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, “just a paper airplane.”

“The dumb idiot.”

After that we went back in the kitchen and Glenda cut the chocolate cake. She had two big pieces and I had one and a half.

“Listen,” she said after awhile, “I'm not supposed to
open the door to people if I don't see who they are first. So don't say anything to my mother about Roddy Fenton being here at all, huh?”

“Okay,” I said, “but what
are
you going to tell her about how all this mess happened?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Glenda said, “I'll think of something. But whatever happens, we'll stick together, huh? Like Monday, with school starting and all, I'll call for you and we'll go together. We'll really stick together. These other kids around here, oh, some of them are okay. But actually, well . . . really, to tell you the truth, most of them give me a pain.”

Glenda took another big bite of chocolate cake. But right after that she put her head down and made a funny choking sound in her throat. Maybe she had too much cake in her mouth. I couldn't tell. So I said, “Thanks, Glenda, really thanks a lot for the lunch. It was great. But I think I have to go now. I promised to help my Mom around the house this afternoon.”

“Yeah,” she said, without looking up. “Bye now.”

I was just
sure
she was crying again.

5

I was pretty busy over the weekend, but on Monday morning, bright and early, Glenda was waiting for me on the corner so that we could walk to school together. It was nice strolling along under the big leafy trees, sort of like Crestview.

The school was new, a junior high school that had just been built the year before. I'd only seen it once, the week before when Drew took me over there to get me registered. All the way to school Glenda kept talking about the dream she'd had the night before.

“I dreamed the school burned down. It was so real, Sara. You know all that yellow brick? Well it melted. Like butter. The school turned out to be nothing but a big pool of dirty melted butter.”

“That's crazy,” I said. “A school like that couldn't burn down. It's probably the most fireproof building in all of Crestview—um, Havenhurst, I mean.”

Glenda looked at me oddly but she didn't say anything.

As soon as we got near the school Glenda started waving to people she knew. Later she explained that they'd all been sixth-graders together at the elementary school she had gone to until last June.

“That's Mary Lou Blenheim,” Glenda said, after calling out “Hi” to a tall girl with a pasty face and long straight hair that was so blonde it was practically white. “She moved here last year. Her family comes from down South.”

Just then we piled into a whole group of girls who knew Glenda. They seemed so friendly I wondered why Glenda said all the kids in the neighborhood were “against” her.

“Hi Glenda. Did you have a good summer? Who's your friend?” There were two of them who always seemed to speak together. One of them, it turned out later, was named Cathanne and the other one was named Patty.

Glenda's eyes were really sparkling. “This is Sara,” she said, “my friend from California. She's living here now, just a couple of doors away from me. Isn't that great?”

Another girl came over to talk and so did a couple of small runty boys. They were probably twelve or thirteen, but why were boys always so small for their age? Glenda repeated the same information to them. I kept wondering why she was telling everyone I was her “friend from California.” It made it sound as though we'd been friends for years and years. And then I realized that was exactly
how Glenda wanted it to sound.

Suddenly Cathanne, who had long red hair and a nose with a very sharp point, got up very close to Glenda's face and squinted. “You're not supposed to wear lipstick to school, you know. You want to catch it the very first day?”

Glenda looked stricken and everybody's eyes became riveted to her lips. They
were
kind of cherry-colored now that I looked at them more carefully. Also, it seemed to me that her eyebrows looked different. They were sort of arched, and dark-looking, instead of golden-brown. And there were little brownish tails at the outer ends of them that curled up slightly.

But I didn't say a word. Poor Glenda. She was so fat. Her whole middle bulged as though she'd first wriggled into three or four bicycle tires that had been pumped full of air and
then
pulled her blouse and navy blue jumper on over that. I knew she thought about boys a lot and she wanted to look nice because there were plenty of boys—older ones, too—at this new school.

“It's not lipstick,” Glenda protested, her cheeks getting nearly as red as her lips. “It's just that I've been biting them.”

Six pairs of eyes stared at her.

“Well,” she went on, “everybody's a little nervous the first day of school.”

Cathanne and Patty looked at each other and grinned.
“Oh well, it's your funeral. But don't expect them to believe that when they put you on a charge for wearing make-up.” They turned and ran off laughing. The rest of the kids drifted after them.

As Glenda and I walked through the schoolyard on our way into the building, I saw Glenda wiping hard at her lips with one of those little lavender-colored tissues she always kept in her pocket.

Glenda was disappointed when it turned out that even though she and I had the same homeroom and the same math and English classes, we didn't have the same lunch hour. I didn't mind so much because I figured it would give me a chance to meet some of the other kids at school.

Sure enough, Mary Lou Blenheim who was also in our homeroom asked me to have lunch with her the very first day. I could tell Glenda didn't like it.

“Did you really eat lunch with Mary Lou?” Glenda asked when we met in our eighth-period English class. “How'd you like her?”

“She seems very nice. I'm surprised you're not more friendly with her.” Actually I'd only spent about ten minutes of the whole lunch period with Mary Lou because we lost each other in the first-day confusion of the school cafeteria, and I'd only found her again toward the end of the period.

Glenda bent over to reach for something under her
seat. She came up red-faced. “She's with . . . with a different crowd. I don't think you ought to get too friendly with her, Sara. I can't say too much about it.”

Oh no, I thought to myself, another one of Glenda's littie mysteries.

On the way to school on Tuesday, Glenda said, “Don't worry about having to eat lunch with Mary Lou, Sara. I decided I'll go see my grade adviser today and I'll get my lunch period changed to yours. It only means they'll have to put me in a different French class.”

“I'm not worried about it. If you do get your lunch period changed, then we could all three eat together. I don't think it would be nice to ditch her.”

“Oh,” Glenda said airily, “don't ever worry about her. She's got lots of other friends.”

At lunchtime, Mary Lou and I went to the cafeteria together. This time things seemed a lot better organized and we chose places at one end of a long table near the entrance. Mary Lou had been telling me that she was a fussy eater and she always brought her lunch from home.

“Sometimes my Mom gives me watercress sandwiches and sometimes I get cucumber, sliced
very
thin with just a
shaving
of butter on the bread. I like things to be delicate like that, don't you?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “Sometimes I get real hungry at lunchtime. I think I'll go over and see what
they've got at the steam table.”

“I'll come with you,” Mary Lou drawled, “just to get my cocoa. My Mom says I've got to have one thing hot. Oh, I just pray it isn't scummy. I hate that, don't you?”

“Oh sure,” I nodded, half-turning to Mary Lou in the crowd that was beginning to collect for the lunch trays. We'd left our books and Mary Lou's lunch bag on the table to hold our places. “Everybody does. Hate scummy cocoa, I mean.”