Not That I Care (12 page)

The gummy eraser, its corner used up.

The pale pink ballet slipper.

The Barbie head, still pleasantly smiling.

The medal of Saint Christopher, hanging from the chain.

All fifty-two cards, bound again with the rubber band and wiped clean from the gook at the bottom of the garbage can.

The branch from the cherry tree that did get cherries, and they were real, and my mother felt lucky to have them, at least for a minute. Maybe other people would think it’s stupid or pathetic, but it’s mine, this branch—like all the rest of the stuff I’m picking out of the trash and loading again into this brown bag. It means something to me.

twenty-four

H
ead down, I walk as quickly
and quietly as I can up the aisle to my seat. Zoe is just finishing her presentation. “And, here’s the tenth thing: my shoelace.” She pulls a gray shoelace out of her bag.

Mrs. Shepard asks, “A shoelace?”

“Yes, because”—Zoe touches the frayed tip of the shoelace—“because I’m just barely holding myself together!” Everybody laughs, including me. I can’t help it. Even though she stole my best friend, she really is funny, and her smile is so broad. She looks at me. I try to decide what to do—smile back? Or let her know she can’t win me over so easy? Not after what she’s done. I stop smiling and just stare. She blinks a few times, then says, “Well, that’s me! In a nutshell. In a Sack. That’s it.”

“Fine,” Mrs. Shepard says.

Zoe shrugs and starts tossing her things back in her Sack. Even though I do have to hate her, I sort of wish I hadn’t missed her presentation. People are leaning back in their chairs like they just ate something good, watching her. I think she just put a piece of French toast in a Baggie into her Sack. What could that have meant?

I clutch the wrinkled brown bag on my lap.
My stuff
, I remind myself.
Maybe it’s not as good as Zoe’s or Olivia’s or CJ’s, but what can I do? You play the hand you’re dealt, as Mom would say
.

Zoe is walking up the aisle toward me and CJ. CJ smiles at her, clapping a little with her hands down by the edge of her desk. I look away, into my desk.

There’s the crumpled note from Olivia. I smooth it out. As Zoe passes me, I’m reading it again.

Sorry I’m such a moody mess. Tommy thinks he’s so great. Ha! I have to tell you something URGENT. Your best friend, Morgan
.

And then under that, in Olivia’s perfect script,
Want to come over after school today?

I pick up my pen and write, in script,
Yes
.

Zoe sits down in her seat.

I fold the note carefully into a little square and grip it in my palm, rubbing my thumb over it, deciding.

twenty-five

“M
organ Miller.”

Clutching my bag, I walk up to the front of the room. On my way, I secretly drop the note on Olivia’s desk. Her thin hand darts out to cover it.

At the front, I turn and face the class. I don’t want to look at anybody. Taking my cue from Olivia, I look straight at the bulletin board behind and above their heads. “So,” I say. “This is me.”

I pull the spatula out of the bag. “A spatula.” I swallow. “Because, um, my hobby is cooking.” I glance at CJ, who is squinting. She knows I don’t cook. I look back at the bulletin board and add, “Also, I once flung it at my brother and cut his head open.”

Somebody laughs, I’m not sure who. I smile and reach back into my bag. “This is a ballet slipper.” As I’m holding it up for the class to see, the Saint Christopher medal falls out of it, onto the floor. “Oops.” I pick it up. Now I’ve got the ballet slipper in one hand and the Saint Christopher medal in the other. “And this is a, it used to belong to my, it’s a religious thing, medal, because, thank God, I don’t have to dance ballet anymore. Ha, ha, ha.”

I set them both down on Mrs. Shepard’s desk.

“Here’s a deck of cards,” I say, pulling them out of my Sack. “They belong to my mother, and she taught me how to play gin, and I really like doing that. You know, sometimes. Because sometimes I beat her.”

I’m about to put them down, but then I think of something to add. “Also, my mother always used to say, ‘You play the hand you’re dealt,’ which means, I think, that, you know, you get what you get, so you may as well try to win with what you’ve got, and that’s like, my philosophy in life. I think. Maybe.”

I wish I hadn’t said that. It sounded better inside my head. I look into the bag quick for something less personal, but the hard thing is all my stuff is really personal. I choose the Barbie head, and pull her out by the hair.

Swinging her back and forth upside down, I explain, “My mother didn’t want me to have Barbies when I was little, because they repress girls’ ambitions, or something like that.”

I think Mrs. Shepard just nodded, but I’m not sure.

“Well, I wanted one anyway, so I bought this one, and it didn’t do anything bad to me. It just, didn’t do much at all. So I popped her head off.”

I swing Barbie’s head onto the ballet slipper.

“What else,” I mumble, peering inside my bag. “Oh, this is a branch from my cherry tree. My parents planted it the day I was born.” I stand in front of them, touching the sticky spot, thinking how to explain.

I shrug and place it beside the Saint Christopher medal.

Looking inside the Sack, I take a deep breath and tell myself,
Get it over with, fast
. I pull out the red-hots and say, “This is for my sweet tooth.” I drop the box on the desk so quick it falls right off, crashes onto the floor, and pops open. Red-hots scatter everywhere. I feel my cheeks getting hot, and the tears welling up behind my eyes, but no way I’m going to fall apart. “Well, so much for that,” I say, trying to smile.

“Finish,” Mrs. Shepard says. “You can sweep at the end of class.”

“OK, sorry,” I mumble.

I don’t want to look at her or anybody. Almost done, almost done, just survive it. I pull out the eraser. “I make a lot of mistakes,” I say. “Obviously.”

I think Mrs. Shepard smiled.

It gives me courage to look at the faces in front of me. Nobody is sneering or grimacing. Zoe is nodding, actually. Jonas has his head tilted sideways, like he’s really listening, and although Tommy is chewing on his thumbnail, he’s looking right at me. Olivia is leaning forward, her face in her hands, smiling. I avoid looking at CJ. I’m just not ready. I place the eraser beside the branch and go back to the bag.

The tooth jiggles inside the small white box as I lift it. I open the box. “This is the first baby tooth I lost. Because, it’s to symbolize, you know . . .” I close my eyes. Say something. “It’s for like, getting rid of the baby parts of me.”

I open my eyes and look right at Mrs. Shepard. “That’s it.” I shrug.

“That’s nine things,” she says.

“Nine?” I start counting, but before I hit five I realize,
Oh, no—the thermometer is in my desk
. “Oh,” I say while my mind is going warp speed. Do I go get it? How do I explain a broken thermometer without starting to cry, without looking straight at CJ and in front of all these people saying,
You are part of me, why don’t you want me anymore? How can you replace me so easily?

Obviously I will never embarrass myself like that. What, then? Somebody shifts, I hear the bottom of a chair squeal against the floor. Mrs. Shepard taps her toe. Once, twice.

“Because,” I say, thinking,
Because what? Because what?
“Because my tenth thing is . . .”
Is what?
This is a nightmare. “My tenth thing . . .” I look into my empty bag as if something might magically materialize. Nothing.

“My tenth thing is nothing.”

“Excuse me?” asks Mrs. Shepard.

“It’s nothing,” I repeat, wondering where I’m going with this. “Not nothing like, poor me, I’m a nothing. That’s not what I mean. No, nothing like, the empty bag, because, the most important thing is, about me, is . . .” I’m talking so fast I have to suck in some air quick. “What I mean is, the future. You know, that I’m not done yet, the most important part of me, or the best part, maybe, is what hasn’t happened yet. What I haven’t made happen yet.”

Nobody moves.

“It’s hard to explain,” I say, loading my things back into the brown paper bag.

“No,” says Mrs. Shepard. “Well said.”

I look over at her. She’s smiling, a little, I think. Some teeth are showing, a couple of bottom teeth are definitely showing. I’m going ahead and counting that as a smile.

“Thanks,” I mumble, clutching my Sack for the walk back up the aisle to my seat.

“Interesting,” Mrs. Shepard adds.

I shrug. She never said
interesting
to Ned. Not that I care, but still.

Turn the page to read the first part of Olivia’s story!

What Are Friends For?

one

S
ome growth spurt. My mother
says an inch, but I know she was tilting the book. I know it was only half an inch, maybe three quarters. She wants to reassure me, but the only time I ever think about how short I am is when everybody keeps consoling me that height doesn’t matter and that anyway I’ll have my growth spurt soon, when my adolescence starts.

I’m not worried about the fact that I still care about current events and my schoolwork either. I know most other seventh-grade girls have only two interests: popularity and boys. That stuff bores me, honestly; when those conversations come up—
Do you think he likes me? Are you mad at me?
—I go over my times tables in my head and wait for a more interesting topic. I know that makes me seem behind the other girls in my grade, less mature, less normal. I can’t help it. It’s not that I’m antisocial; I’m actually very friendly. It’s just that I can’t help noticing that the seventh-grade girls who used to be reasonably intelligent people have recently become idiotic, single-minded bimbos, one after another, as the hormones hit. People like CJ Hurley, a gifted ballerina and a sensitive friend, lose all perspective and every interest when some dirty-fingernailed but popular boy calls her up on the phone.

I wonder when it will happen to me.

two

T
his morning when I got to
school, I had only a few paragraphs to go in the chapter I was reading, so I stumbled up onto the curb with the book still in front of my face. When I finished the chapter, closed my book, and looked up, Morgan Miller was staring right at me. I looked behind me to be sure it wasn’t somebody else, but no, it was me.

I don’t waste my time keeping up to the minute on who is in and out, but everybody in our grade knows that Morgan is always at the center of things. She tends to be very angry at somebody at least once a week and to have intense opinions about what is and isn’t acceptable—clothes, behavior, all the details of life. I care a lot about moral issues like free speech and homeless people, but not so much about what an acquaintance wears. Morgan scares me a little.

So when she stared at me like that, I said something like, “You coming into school?” We’ve always been friendly, though distantly, and she looked particularly fierce right then. I don’t care who likes me or doesn’t, but it’s not good to be the one Morgan is angry at.

She sprinted over to me, latched onto my arm, and dragged me by the elbow into school, whispering, “Some people think they are so great.” She stormed off to her own homeroom when I asked her who.

In homeroom, permission slips for next week’s seventh-grade apple-picking trip were handed out. Zoe Grandon, who sits next to me, opened her big blue eyes wide and smiled at me. I guess she was excited about the trip, which I was dreading because last year, as everybody in Boggs Middle School knows, two seventh-grade couples got caught kissing behind a haystack on the apple-picking trip. For weeks after they came back all the boys in the whole school were talking about it, pretending to cough, but really saying “hay-stacking” and meaning
kissing
. It’s what made me dislike boys last year, all that talk of
hay-stacking, hay-stacking
, like all they thought girls were good for, all of us who’ve been their buddies and first basemen and lab partners, all they thought of when they saw us was
hay-stacking
. My brother, Dex, told me I needed to relax. He thought it was funny four of his friends got suspended. I thought the whole thing was insulting and annoying. But that’s just my opinion.

All through the announcements, Zoe fiddled with a silver ring on her finger. When the bell rang and Zoe and I were walking out of the room, I complimented her on the ring.

“Thanks,” she said with a huge smile. “I got it this weekend.” She held her hand out for me to get a better look.

“Pretty,” I said. “I like the knot.”

Zoe nodded. “It’s a friendship ring. CJ has the same one.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.” CJ Hurley’s mother and mine are very tight; we go on family vacations together, but CJ and I aren’t especially close. She is nervous and timid, and not too interested in anything but ballet, which is her life. She’s very talented. Ballet and, lately, boys. And always Morgan. As far as I knew, CJ’s best friend was Morgan, not Zoe.