Ten (19 page)

She pressed a washcloth filled with ice against my head and readjusted my pillow. Dad had carried me upstairs to my bed during my two minutes of unconsciousness, I'd been told. He was now outside breaking down the box. Ty was with him, helping him jump on it.

“I wasn't pretending to be a lamp,” I protested. I lifted my Coke to my lips. I took a tiny sip and put it back on my bedside table.

“Not to mention the fact that it's New Year's Day. The emergency room is probably overflowing with drunks and degenerates.”

“So she'd fit right in,” Sandra called from her room.

“Eavesdropper!” I called, then winced and wished I hadn't.

Mom shook her head. “What a way to usher in the new year. If the swelling isn't down by morning, I'll take you to Dr. Larson's.”

“Can I have another Coke when I finish this one?” I asked.

“No,” Sandra called.

“Sandra? Hush,” Mom called back. To me, she said, “Absolutely not, and you're lucky you didn't break your nose.”

I got to watch movies in bed for the rest of the night. Dad brought up the portable DVD player that we used on long car trips, and Ty snuggled up with me, asking every so often if he could touch my bump. Sandra tracked down Dad's camera and took pictures of it.

“Quit,” I said.

“I haven't gotten it from this angle,” she said, squeezing onto my bed and taking a picture from below my head.

“Quit!”

“Fine, you big baby.” She put the camera on my nightstand, but stayed where she was. “Poor little Nemo,” she mused, getting sucked into the movie. “When, oh when, will you realize that you weren't big enough to go out on your own?”

I elbowed her, but not hard. I liked being cuddled up with Ty on one side and Sandra on the other. They were the bread, and I was the cheese. Or the baloney. No, the cheese, just not the
hi-ho the derry-o
sort of cheese, because the one thing I
wasn't
was alone.

“Here you go, sweetie,” Mom said, coming in with a fresh ice pack. “Are you feeling any better?”

“A little,” I said. “Do you want to watch
Finding Nemo
with us?”

She was about to say no. I saw it on her face. Then she smiled and said, “Sure.” Angling her head toward the hall, she called, “Joel! Come up to Winnie's room. We're having family movie night!”

The three of us kids scooched into the middle of my bed, which luckily was a queen-size bed and barely big enough for the whole family. Mom and Dad made up the bookends. I was still in the very middle.

We watched the movie. I cried when Marlin realized Nemo wasn't dead after all, and Mom reached over Ty and gently rubbed the back of my neck. “Oh, Winnie. You've had a rough start to the year, haven't you?”

“Huh?” I said. I was with my whole family, watching a movie
I
picked out. And sure, the ending made me weepy, but in a good way. “Um, if by that you mean the
best
start to the year, then yes.”

Mom laughed. “All right, well, I really don't know what you just said. But if you're happy, I'm happy.”

“I'm happy,” I said. “Anyway, every day is a new day, not just
this
particular day which happens to be called New Year's Day.”

“You lost me,” Mom said.

“Just nod and say, ‘Yes, Winnie. We love you, Winnie,' ” Sandra said in a mock-whisper. “She got hit in the head, you know. In a box.
All by herself
.”

I whapped her. “Shush up, you.”

“I
do
love you, Winnie,” Ty said. He yawned. “And I'm glad you're not a shark, even though some sharks turn out to be nice.”

“I love you, too, Ty. And you and you and you,” I said, looking at Mom, Dad, and Sandra in turn.

Sandra rolled her eyes.

I rolled mine back at her. “And all I mean is that no matter what, we can always start fresh tomorrow.”

I
n February, Mindy started a secret club. A
mean
secret club. Every morning, she and Katie picked a special friend for the day. First, the girl they chose had to be inspected: her clothes had to be the right kind of clothes, her hair had to be in an acceptable style, her personality had to meet some mysterious standard that only Mindy and Katie understood.

If the girl scored at least a seven out of ten, then she passed the inspection, and she got to eat lunch with Mindy and Katie and whisper with Mindy and Katie and torment people on the playground with Mindy and Katie.

Often they tormented Dinah Devine.

“She still wets her pants,” Mindy said loudly in the lunchroom last week. “I can smell it.”

“I feel sorry for her,” Katie said. But she didn't mean it.

On the Dinah-wets-her-pants day, Louise was their special buddy. She blinked nervously and said, “Me too,” and Mindy and Katie laughed. It was unclear who they were laughing at.

More often, however, they tormented
me
. They claimed I sneezed on my sandwich and ate it anyway. They claimed I dug an eye booger out of my eye and ate that, too. They called me “Lint,” because lint clung to things and was annoying. But I didn't cling to things, especially them. They had just decided I was the enemy, that's all. Or the target, like in a game of darts, and their words and eye-rolls and snickers were the darts.

But Mindy made me cry one time and one time only: the time she was so mean about the Secret Santa present I gave her. I hadn't cried since then, and I wasn't going to.

That didn't mean their teasing didn't hurt.

On the outside, I pretended to be brave Winnie who wasn't scared of anything: not toilets, not outside garbage cans, not the Bathroom Lady, and not Mindy. But on the inside, I
wanted
to cry. On the inside I felt like I was three going on four, like Ty had been when frilly Erica was mean to him at the pool, instead of ten coming up fast on eleven.

One cold morning, Amanda dashed up and pulled me to the corner of the room.

“You're not going to believe this. It's
bad
,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“No, Winnie, it's
really
bad. It's . . . Chantelle.”

“Is she sick?”

Amanda shook her head. “Worse. Mindy and Katie picked her to be their friend for the day.”

My gut clenched. “What?!”

“I know, but they did. And Chantelle, she . . .” Amanda pressed her lips together. “She said yes.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“I know,” Amanda said again.

“She herself said how rude Mindy is. She
knows
how rude Mindy is!”

Amanda's expression was bleak. “I know,” she said for the third and final time. “I just thought I'd warn you.”

I felt sick all day. When recess came around, I felt so sick I thought I might actually throw up.

I grabbed Amanda and said, “Come on, let's go swing.”

Maybe if I was swooping up and down through the air, I told myself, then Mindy couldn't get to me.

Wrong.

“Here they come,” Amanda said from the swing beside me.

I didn't want to look. I couldn't help
but
look. My head turned on its own to take in their cocky saunter across the playground: Mindy, Katie, and—yes—Chantelle. Chantelle looked pretty and put together, like she always did, but she also looked . . . different. I couldn't put my finger on how.

“Why?” I whispered, meaning why why
why
would Chantelle do this, when the person she was doing it to was me?

“I have no idea,” Amanda said.

“Maybe . . . maybe they won't be mean this time. Chantelle wouldn't let them be
mean
, would she?”

Amanda didn't respond.

They arrived with linked arms. Chantelle wouldn't meet my gaze.

“Well, if it isn't Lint,” Mindy said. She smiled. “Girls, say hi to Lint.”

“Hi, Lint,” Katie said. Her tone was perfectly friendly. She even gave a little wave.

“My name's not—” I broke off. What was the point?

“Chantelle?” Mindy prompted.

“Chantelle, don't,” Amanda said to her.

“You don't want Chantelle to say hi to her friend?” Mindy said.

“How rude,” Katie said.

Mindy hip-bumped Chantelle, and Chantelle stumbled because she'd been holding herself so rigidly.
That
was what was different about her. Chantelle, usually as fluid and graceful as water, was as stiff as a crayon. A waxy, expressionless crayon.

I willed her to just look at me and see that it was
me
, but she didn't. She stared at the ground and said, “Hi.”

“Hi who?” Mindy prodded.

Don't,
I willed her.

With a crayon's lifeless energy, Chantelle said, “Hi, Lint.”

Shame rose up in me, and all at once I needed to stop swinging. I
had
to stop swinging, because I'd felt ill all along, but now there was a real chance that my stomach would turn itself inside out, and up would come my breakfast plus my morning snack.

If I threw up in front of Mindy, I would die. I'd have to drop out of Trinity and switch schools. I'd have to move to a new state, or Canada.

“I am
so
disappointed in you, Chantelle,” Amanda said, loud and clear and brave. She hopped off her swing. “Come on, Winnie. Let's go do something fun. Let's go find the
nice
people.”

I was dizzy with gratitude, and I jumped off poorly, lurching forward and going down hard.

“Ow,”
I said, unable not to.

Mindy snorted. From above me, her words pelted my sprawled figure like rocks. “Do you know what you're like, Winnie? You're like a flea on a dog's back that I just can't get rid of, no matter how hard I try.”

I pushed myself to my knees. I had to. I rose unsteadily to my feet and made myself say the words I was thinking. “Does that make you the dog?”

Mindy's eyes widened. Then they narrowed, turning to flint. She stepped closer. “What did you just say?”

Amanda moved beside me and took my hand.

“Well, if I'm a flea”—my voice wobbled, but I pressed on—“then that makes you the dog. Right?”

Mindy's nostrils flared. “You're calling me a
dog
?”

I shrugged.
I
wasn't calling her a dog. She was calling herself a dog.

“Take it back,” she said. She got up in my face.
“Take. It. Back.”

Her breath smelled like honey. Splotches of red mottled her skin, and I could see every fleck of color in her eyes. I'd thought they were just brown, but there was gold mixed in as well. On her left iris, above the pupil, a particularly large slash of gold stood out.

She slapped me.

All thoughts flew from my mind, replaced first by shock and then by pain. Then came a tunneling-in of time like nothing I'd ever experienced, even when I fell over in the lamp box and was knocked unconscious. Everything was bright. Everything happened slowly.

Amanda gasped. She slapped Mindy, or tried to, but Mindy's hand flew up and caught her wrist, twisting it until Amanda cried out.

“Let her go!” I yelled. I threw myself at Mindy, knocking her to the ground. Dimly, I heard Chantelle say, “Amanda, are you okay?” Katie said something, too, but I didn't know what, and I didn't care.

I pinned Mindy's wrists to the ground and drove my knee into her hip. She kneed me in the gut. When that didn't work, she squirmed beneath me and dug her fingernails into my skin.

I clenched my jaw, but I didn't punch her, or spit at her, or any number of other things I could have done. I also didn't release her, because
nobody
hurts my friend.

“You guys, the teachers are coming!” I heard. Hands pulled at me urgently. “Winnie, get up. If they catch you fighting . . .”

A second set of hands tugged at me, and Amanda's face appeared upside down in my line of vision. “Winnie, hurry.
Please.
”

And then—
swoosh
. Time returned to normal. The playground teemed with noise. I pushed my weight into Mindy one last time, and then I let her go and rolled off her. I breathed heavily, clasping my arms around my shins.

Mindy sat up. A twig clung to her hair. Her gold-flecked eyes were animal eyes, cold and flat.

“You are so dead,” she told me. “You're going to get expelled, you know.”

“No way, Mindy,” Amanda said, fast and slow. “
You
slapped Winnie. So if anyone gets in trouble, it'll be you, because you started it.”

“Says who?” Mindy demanded. She gestured at Katie and Chantelle. “I've got witnesses. Three against two.”

“You think you can just
lie
?” Amanda said. “On top of everything else?”

Ms. Meyers was almost to us. Mr. Hutchinson, one of the sixth grade teachers, was close behind.

Amanda grabbed Chantelle's elbow, pulling her away from Katie. Chantelle came willingly, and my brain registered a detail that I hadn't fully processed.

Two
people pulled me off Mindy. Two people wanted to save me from getting in trouble.

“Chantelle is with us,” Amanda stated. “Right, Chantelle?”

Chantelle gulped and bobbed her head. She looked at me—finally—and she was no longer a crayon, because crayons didn't have eyes that welled with tears.
“Sorry,”
she whispered miserably.

Amanda helped me get to my feet.

“We choose Winnie,” she said, putting her arm around me.