Out on a Limb (11 page)

Devo sighed. “Okay. Friday? At lunch? Your sandwich? Just.... I felt like sort of a jerk later. For going on about it. Sorry, I guess, is what I’m saying.”

“What, are the Supervees making you say this or something?” I asked. He did seem sorry though.

“Nobody
makes
me do anything. I just thought later that it might have made you feel bad. Cause you’re new, and all.”

I nodded once.

“So I brought you something. To eat.”

I remembered Devo’s designer junk food from New York. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he nodded and he stuck out his arm. “Your favourite.” His hand was so close to my face that it took a moment to refocus on the glistening thing he held. It was a big green slug, waving its feelers in slow motion. It was the most revolting thing I’d ever seen close up. As I jumped back, I heard this wimpy little scream. I am sorry to say that it was me.

Matt and Zach and Heath were yukking it up, but Devo’s face hadn’t changed. “Help yourself,” he invited, all gracious. I didn’t know how he could hold that slug in his bare hand.

“Get that away from her,” Bridget demanded.

I backed away until the bricks of the school were right behind me.

“Come on, try it,” Devo said, and he chucked the slug underhand. His aim was perfect. The slug belly sucked onto my forearm and held. I thought I might pass out from horror, but I didn’t. I flapped my arm to get it off. Devo and Co. all found this hilarious, but the flapping had no effect on the slug. It clung to me. My brain pulsed. Should I flick it off? I’d have to touch it with my bare hand. Brush it against the building? I might squish its guts out. I flapped harder.

Bridget picked up a stick. She stepped forward with it cautiously, a bit at a time, as though she were going to tame a lion. She poked at the slug, and when she nudged it off my arm she leaped backward, as though the slug might make a lunge for her. I’m not criticizing though. I would have done exactly the same.

The slug hit the courtyard and curled up, traumatized by the poke, the fall and the grit. Devo bent to pick it up. I was not about to go through the same ordeal again. I ran.Feet pounded behind me.

“Try it,” Matt called.

“Eat it,” Zach giggled stupidly, all out of breath.

I wrenched open the door of the girls’ washroom and charged into sudden silence. With a paper towel I rubbed silver slime off my forearm. My knees were shaking. I was probably more traumatized than the slug. As the washroom door swung open I prepared to defend myself. But it was not my attackers. It was Bridget.“

You okay?” Her voice reverbed off the white tile walls.

“Yeah,” I said. “What a total psychopath Devo is,” she said.

“Total,” I agreed.

“Don’t go outside,” Bridget warned. “The three of them are right by the door.” There was no other exit from the washroom: the door to the hallway was locked because of Windward’s rule that students have to stay outside at lunch.

“Jerks,” I said.

“Total jerks. Let’s just stay here,” Bridget said, “so they waste their whole lunch hour waiting.”

“Okay.” I was touched by Bridget’s offer to keep me company in a smelly school washroom.

“Not much to do though, is there,” Bridget said.

“No.” I was worried that she’d get bored. “Ever notice your reflection in the paper towel dispenser? Lean close.”

Bridget put her face near the warped silver metal. “Hey yeah,” she said. “Cyclops eye.”

“Go back a bit.”

“Weird! Three eyes!”

We leaned from different angles, checking out our pear-shaped faces, and our hourglass faces, and our faces shaped like light bulbs. We were killing ourselves laughing when two Grade Eight girls came in. “Our turn,” one declared, and they crowded us away from the dispenser.

“Okay, I thought up something else,” Bridget said. “Take a paper towel and bunch it up and stand back here and aim for the spot that turns on the automatic hand dryer,” she said. “We can keep score with toilet paper. One piece per point.”

Before I knew it lunch hour was over. I was sorry to hear the one o’clock bell, and I think Bridget was too. We stayed a few minutes extra to break the tie. When we headed to our classroom everyone else in the class was already in the hallway waiting for the door to open. Kendra watched us approach with her eye corners. “Want to come to my place after school?” Bridget asked me. I guess Bridget thought that if we could have fun in a school washroom, we could have fun anywhere.

NOTEBOOK: #14

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: The Lie

Of course I could go to Bridget’s
after school, Mom said when I called her at the linguistics lab. She sounded thrilled that I had made a friend. I was thrilled too. Only one thing worried me as I sat in communication skills, waiting for the 3:20 bell. If Bridget and I were going to be friends, I was going to have to tell her that I lived in a treehouse. I didn’t have a problem telling Bridget, but I did not want Kendra to find out. Or Devo. Or Sienna. Or Twyla or Nova. Or Matt or Heath or Zach. Not yet, anyway. When I was more established at Windward Middle School I would come out about living in a treehouse. So when I told Bridget about the treehouse after school that day, I would ask her to keep it a secret. I trusted her to keep a secret.

Bridget’s Mom, Paige, picked us up after school. She put my bike in the back of her minivan and drove us to Bridget’s house. Windward is totally surrounded by fancy houses, so I shouldn’t have been so freaked that one of them was Bridget’s. I’d just never been inside a house like that before, and I wasn’t ready for how big it was up close.

“Here we are,” Paige said, idling the minivan while the automatic garage door rolled away. The garage was three times the size of the entire treehouse. From the garage we entered a room that was more treehouse sized. It was “the mud room,” which was basically a giant closet for boots and umbrellas and stuff. Beyond that was the family room. It was huge. There was so much space that you could hardly stub a toe if you were trying. Our little treehouse suddenly seemed a bit pathetic.

“Snack, girls?” Paige asked, putting down a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. These cookies were heaven. They were a million times better than packaged, and several zillion times better than Mom’s campfire cookies. Even the Hanrahan milk was better than ours, because a propane fridge is never cold enough. I drained my glass in four glugs. Paige refilled it, then sat at the table and started asking questions. I didn’t mind to begin with. Her first questions could all be answered with a simple yes. Yes, I was new to Windward. Yes, I had gone to Queen’s Heights before. Yes, I liked Windward. But yes, I did miss my old friends.

Then Paige asked me a harder question. “Whereabouts do you live?” I was already losing my nerve about explaining the treehouse to Bridget. Even less did I want to explain it to Paige, who probably had no interest in rope swings or dumbwaiters. Her own house must be what she liked, I reasoned: therefore the treehouse would sound cramped and inconvenient to her. And how could I swear Paige to secrecy, an adult I’d just met? But if she wasn’t sworn, she’d tell other mothers, and pretty soon Devo and Kendra would know everything. When I told Bridget about the treehouse, we had to be alone.

“Where do I live? Um. Out that way,” I answered, waving my hand around.

“On the University Endowment Lands?” Paige asked. “Yes,” I said truthfully.

“Oh, lovely. That’s such a nice area. Beautiful woods. Which street do you live on?”

The conversation was not going well. I didn’t live on a street at all. The treehouse was nowhere near one. And yet Paige’s very question showed that people were fully expected to live on streets. The question showed that to not live on a street was positively weird.

“Bellemonde Drive,” I said. It was the closest I could get to the truth without giving a full explanation.

“Bellemonde Drive!” Paige gasped, and I suddenly realized my mistake. She thought I lived in one of the mansions on Bellemonde. Of course she’d think that. There were nothing
but
mansions on Bellemonde Drive. What had I done?

“So, you must live in one of those big Edwardian places,” Paige said.

“I don’t know about Edwardian,” I said. “And it’s not really very big. At all.”

“I adore all those places on Bellemonde,” Paige said. “Mom’s degree is in architecture,” Bridget said. “She goes mental over old mansions.”

“A bit mental,” Paige admitted. “Especially Edwardian. Even before architecture school I was in love with houses like yours.”

The phone rang and Paige got up to answer it. Bridget reached for another cookie. I’d lost my appetite. I had lied! I had made Bridget and her mom think I lived in a mansion! I hadn’t meant to lie. Or had I? Maybe not wanting to say the truth was the same thing as wanting to lie? I had to say something right away, I thought, as Paige hung up the phone. But when she returned to the table Paige reported that the soccer coach had just called about practice on Friday, and Bridget told Paige that she needed new cleats, and Paige told Bridget she couldn’t possibly need new ones yet, and Bridget told Paige that her feet were two inches longer than they’d been four months ago, and Paige went to the mud room to inspect Bridget’s cleats, and I had not said a thing. Bridget and I went up to her room.

“What do you feel like doing?” she asked, flopping on her enormous bed. She sounded exactly normal. She had no idea I’d lied. It seemed like my guilt would send out some kind of aura or vibration or something. I guess that’s why I was so surprised that Bridget couldn’t tell. I shouldn’t have been though. After all, the whole point of dishonesty is that people not find out.

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering how to bring up the truth. “Do you want to try decoding that letter?” she asked. “I’ve still got the pictures on my phone, if you don’t have them with you.”

“Actually, I wrote the whole letter out again. I’ve got it here,” I said, sitting down beside her.

“You don’t mind me helping?”

“Mind? Why would I mind?”

“In case it was secret, or something.”

“No, I don’t mind at all,” I said. Whatever Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter might turn out to say, I had no intention of keeping secrets from Bridget. I was going to tell her about my treehouse, in only a moment.

“What have you tried so far?” Bridget asked, and I explained all of the code alphabets I had tried. Tell her
now
, I told myself.

“You know,” Bridget said, taking the replica coded letter from me, “I’m starting to think that this letter isn’t written in a coded alphabet at all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah look,” Bridget said. “All the words have vowels, like normal words. That wouldn’t happen randomly, if your aunt whatzername had just replaced the real letters with ones from a code alphabet. Would it? Maybe it’s all anagrams. You know, where the letters in every word stay the same but are rearranged? You don’t mind if I write out my own copy, do you?”

“Of course not.” Now, I told myself as Bridget hunched on the bed copying the letter.
Tell her about the treehouse now. Right now. Okay, go
. I swear that I actually opened my mouth to start, but just then Paige walked in with Bridget’s clean laundry and I closed my mouth again. Bridget and I worked on anagrams, but soon realized they were not the answer. Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter was full of two-letter words like‘ID’ and‘TE’ and‘LE’ and ‘PE’ that couldn’t be rearranged into real words, and the ‘X’ at the end couldn’t be rearranged at all. Somehow the right moment to tell Bridget that I lived in a treehouse did not come along. Late in the afternoon Paige reminded Bridget of her piano lesson. I recognized this as my cue to leave, and I collected my backpack and fleece jacket. “We’ll go out by the garage door, Rosie,” Paige said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”“

No!” I said. “No, that’s okay.” I could just picture Great-great-aunt Lydia swatting me away from her front gate on Bellemonde Drive while Bridget and her mom watched from the minivan. It would be horrible if they found out the truth that way. There was a puzzled silence, and I felt like I should fill it up. “Car trips of three miles or less cause half of all exhaust emissions,” I said. “So I’d rather ride my bike. To reduce global warming.”

“Oh.” Paige smiled. “But I hate to send you riding off all by yourself when it will be getting dark soon.”

“I’ll be home way before dark,” I said. “And I like riding all by myself. I like the quiet. It’s when I meditate.”

After a few more ride offers Paige let me get my bike out of the minivan. It had gotten cold, and my knuckles turned white on my handlebars. To turn what I’d just said into the truth, I tried to meditate. But my meditations never rose above one pestering thought. All my meditations were on how totally hard it was getting to tell Bridget about the treehouse.

NOTEBOOK: #15

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: Fever

When it rained again
three days later, I couldn’t stand to return to school in my weird rain gear. I wore it out of the treehouse to avoid arguing with Mom, but when Tilley and I were getting our bikes from the shed, I stuffed my cape and gaiters in my backpack.

“You’re gonna get soaked,” came the voice from inside Tilley’s orange plastic hood.

“Lesser of two evils,” I said, and we set off on our bikes. The rain fell down from the sky and the mud sprayed up from my tires. I was oozing by the time we reached Sir Combover Elementary. When I watched Tilley scamper across the school grounds all dry and comfortable in her cape and gaiters, I almost wished I’d worn my rain gear too. But when the orange of her retreating outfit burned an afterimage onto my retina, I knew I’d made the right decision.

I got to Windward and headed for my classroom as the warning bell rang. Devo, Matt, Heath and Zach were funneling in the doorway. Like me, they were wearing fleece jackets, but theirs were dry. They had gotten rides to school. “Hey, look what crawled out of the sewer,” Devo said, and they all did their laugh track. I sneered in self-defence. A rivulet of dirty rainwater rounded the corner of my lip, and dribbled into my mouth. Miss Rankle opened up the classroom door. I went into the cloakroom and hung up my fleece jacket. A pool was forming beneath it when Kendra, Twyla and Sienna came in.