The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt

Table of Contents

 

 

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Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

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Text set in Bembo
S.A.

 

Kimmel, Elizabeth Cody.
The reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt / by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel.
p. cm.
Summary: On her first day of boarding school, a thirteen-year-old girl
who feels boring and invisible decides to change her personality to match
her unusual name.

eISBN : 978-1-101-42750-7

[1. Personality—Fiction. 2. Self-perception—Fiction.
3. Boarding schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K56475Re 2010
[Fic]--dc22 2009037939

F
or
S
pinky

W
hat goes through people’s heads when they come up with names for their kids? Mine, for example. You should be sitting for this. And a deep cleansing breath. Ready?

My full name is Moxie Roosevelt Kipper. In addition to being a mouthful, and a name I will have to spell out for people for the rest of my life, this is a difficult name to live up to. On my very first day of kindergarten, my teacher took attendance, and when she got to the
K
s, her face lit up and she said, “Moxie Roosevelt Kipper—oh my—and who belongs to this very big name?” And when I stood up, all small and ordinary, her face sort of fell—just for a second, before she replaced it with a huge kindergarten-teacher smile. But the message had been received. People expected something when they heard my wacky name, and to date, I have been unable to deliver. I blame my mother and father.

My parents claimed my name was charming, unique, and perfectly represented our family. My father, who’s a soda company executive, picked Moxie. Apparently, back in the dim and misty, before TV and basic life-sustaining technology like Internet and cell phones, there was a caffeine- and sugar-packed soda called Moxie. It was sort of a prehistoric version of Red Bull or something. Gave you a nice little lift. And if you were the kind of person who had lots of zip or energy or stood out in some way, people would say “You’ve got moxie.”

This Moxie has no moxie.

Because he cannot be a normal father and collect sports paraphernalia or car magazines, my dad collects old Moxie bottles and ads. He displays them in a glass case in his office. And so far, I’m the only human addition to his collection. I suppose I should be glad he’s not fixated on a different soda, making me Mountain Dew Roosevelt or Dr Pepper Kipper. But forgive me, I just don’t feel all steeped in good fortune when it comes to the name department.

My mother picked the Roosevelt part. She runs an Internet grassroots political organization called It’s Time. She spends her morning yelling at the newspaper, and has devoted half her life to weeding out corrupt politicians (weeding them out from WHAT I do not know). She spends the other half of her life attempting to direct our country’s resources to assist the needy. Apparently, I am named after not just one Roosevelt, but two of them. First, for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because of his social programs to help the poor. Second, for President Theodore Roosevelt, because of his character and integrity, in spite of the fact that he was a Republican (which my mom insists doesn’t count because he joined the Progressive party before the election).

Again, you might think I should be counting my lucky stars that she didn’t insist on naming me Moxie T. Roosevelt-FDR Kipper, just to be accurate. I’m sure she thought about it. But lucky? I don’t think so. That two educated people could even agree on such a name for their only daughter is tragic and perplexing.

I have spent thirteen years as Moxie Roosevelt Kipper, each one of them more ordinary than the last. There were only eighty-seven kids at my old school, and everybody knew which of them were future criminals, or bordering on genius, or hysterically eccentric, or dangerously unpredictable. I was none of these things. There was no name for the kind of kid I was, because other than being able to play the piano, I wasn’t much of anything at all.

Here’s a little story. About halfway through last year, a bunch of kids snuck into the faculty room and trashed it with toilet paper and shaving cream. They wrote comments—some of them not so nice—on the walls with Silly String. And the principal made this gigantic, huge deal about it, like they were going to bring in the FBI or something.

Most of my class was totally freaking out. Everyone was huddled in little vibrating clusters, worried that they would be questioned, or worse, busted. That it would go on their Permanent Record.That it would Affect Their Entire Future. There was this huge sense of camaraderie about it all.

I made the mistake of joining one of these conversations—I made some comment about how yeah, man, I’m really scared they’re going to call me into the principal’s office. And everybody just kind of looked at me like I was a kitten dressed up in a cute outfit. Then this one girl Gretchen said, “Oh Mox, you don’t need to worry. They’re looking for
troublemakers
.”

I should have said something about how I
was
a troublemaker—I just never got caught. But I didn’t. I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth, which made me furious. It was easy for Gretchen to talk, after all. She had a solid troublemaking reputation. Not one month earlier she had tried to roll the grand piano out of the music room as a practical joke, and accidentally snapped one of its legs off. She practically had a parole officer.

It’s not that I
want
people to think I’m a criminal. It’s just . . . I don’t want them to automatically
assume
I’m not one. Basically, nothing had changed since that first day of kindergarten. It made me nuts. I had to go straight to the music room and pound out some Chopin. I count it as bitterly ironic that I was playing on the very same piano that had lost a leg to Gretchen’s practical joke. Some things can only be solved by playing finger-eating waltzes at lightning speed on a grand piano with the lid up. Which basically lays out my geekdom for you right there.

Actually, geekdom would have been an improvement. My problem was invisibility. I felt like I always ended up flying under people’s radar.You know, like when you know everything about someone, and apparently they don’t recall having even met you? Like last summer, which was my last year at Camp Migawam. I was finally in the oldest group of girls. That summer we had a daytime program exchange going on with the boys’ camp across the lake for a boat-building project. Ten boys canoed over to our side of the lake every day to hammer and saw, and the finest one of all was named Carson McGillion. Blue eyes, dimples. The works. I adored him. Well, everybody did. Especially Daphne Anderson, who had very blond hair she wore in super-high, non-age-appropriate pigtails, which the boys liked to tug.

So imagine my surprise when I ran into Carson McGillion at the Space Museum that fall. I decided there was no point in being a wallflower during this very brief window of opportunity, so I walked right up to him. I planned to say: “Hey Carson! It’s so cool to see you again—how’ve you been?” But I ended up just standing there looking at him with my mouth open like I was trying to catch my breath. And his eyes got very wide and you could see the mental grasping going on behind them. In short, Carson McGillion had no idea in France who I was or why I was standing there showing him my tonsils. I’d been just another face in the crowd at boat-building. You can bet if I was Daphne Anderson coyly bouncing a couple of pigtails around, Carson McGillion would have remembered me.

So I realized that one day, when I got out of this little school, I was going to have to do something about my personality. Change it to something that really stood out, like my name—unusual, a bit outlandish, unexpected, sassy.

Finally, my chance had come. I was leaving for boarding school.

This was not as exotic as it might sound. Like I said, I wasn’t a genius or a budding criminal. I didn’t come from a stupendously wealthy family that tossed bundles of cash on the fire when there was no wood around. And no, I wasn’t the orphaned child of profoundly gifted wizards, nor had the living embodiment of evil Who Shall Not Be Named ever at any time tried to kill me but only succeeded in scarring my forehead. Nope, I was just a regular girl going to a regular boarding school. Except that everything I knew about boarding school came from the Harry Potter books. Try as I might to imagine the reality of what lay ahead, I kept coming up with scenes of Sorting Hats and Dementors. In other words, I was pretty unprepared.

It’s not like I hadn’t known this day was coming. My family lived in the boondocks of the boondocks. Pine Point, New Hampshire. If a person developed a sudden craving for a Twinkie or the latest issue of
Fabulous
magazine at my house, it was a twenty-five-minute drive to the nearest minimart. Our local school only went through the seventh grade. After that, the public school for our district was in a city called Pildrake. It’s a forty-mile back-road commute, twice a day, to a school with so many students, the entire building could probably secede from the United States and establish its own zit-covered nation.