A Girl Called Dust (8 page)

    
Students trickled in for her next class. She stopped staring and cleared her
throat. “You can make up the assignment after school . . . on the laptop. Run
along before you’re late.” I took that to mean,
please get out of my sight
because you’re freaking me out
.

    
By lunch, everyone knew about the crayfish incident, and even though I was
starving—I always seemed to be starving those days—I didn’t dare enter the
cafeteria. I didn’t have a death wish, and venturing into the cafeteria after
what had happened would have been just that. I would have been a stupid mouse
walking willingly into a lion’s den. Instead, I opted to sit on the curb in the
school parking lot and wait out lunch period, ignoring my rumbling belly.

    
I was busy folding a leaf into fours when someone stuck a peanut butter
sandwich in my face. Fletcher sat beside me. “They’re serving meatloaf today,
so this was the safest thing.”

    
I grabbed the sandwich from him. Peanut butter wasn’t my favorite, but I would
have eaten anything at that moment. “Thanks,” I managed to mumble after I had
inhaled half the sandwich.

    
“I heard about the crayfish. Didn’t you eat breakfast this morning?” If this
question had come from anyone else, I would have thought they were being an
ass, but of course this was Fletcher. He was dead serious. “You probably
shouldn’t eat things like that in front of people.”

    
You think?

    
“How did it taste?” Fletcher asked.

“How would I know? I don’t even remember
doing it. I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, even though I did. Once I’d
finished my sandwich, still hungry, I looked at Fletcher. “Why did I do that? I
didn’t realize what was happening until it was over.”

Fletcher looked away from me and bit into
a pear he’d probably brought from home. “I don’t know.” I knew he was lying
because he avoided looking at me, but Fletcher never lied. So why was he?

“You know. Why are you lying to me? You
never lie. You just say you can’t tell me.”

He looked at me. “I can’t tell you. Not
now.”

“Fletch, come on!” I whined. Somehow, he
knew things about me, secrets I didn’t even know about myself, and if he didn’t
tell me soon, I would explode.

He
finished his pear and gnawed on the core. “Soon, I’ll tell you. I promise.”

That afternoon I went back to Ms.
Melcher’s class to complete my assignment using the computer program, which I
found to be insanely boring. Bailey was also there making up her project, which
she also hadn’t been able to complete on account of me. She never looked at me
once to acknowledge my presence.

Mom was banging away in the kitchen when I
got home. I hovered in the doorway. “I’m home. Sorry I’m late. I had to do some
makeup work.”

She slammed a pot on the stove. “I know.
Ms. Melcher called earlier.”

My throat tightened. This was the last
thing I needed. Another reason for my mom to be disappointed in me. “What did
she say?”

Mom stopped what she was doing and glared
at me. “She told me what happened in class, Arden. What’s wrong with you? I
mean, really, what is wrong?”

I had no answer. What I had done was gross
and weird. I couldn’t argue with that. I had no idea why or how I had done it.
I certainly hadn’t planned on doing it. I wanted everyone to forget it ever
happened, but I knew that was asking too much.

Mom looked at me expectantly and then gave
up on getting an answer. “Don’t bother taking your shoes off. We’re going right
to Urgent Care.”

Everything seemed like a delayed reaction.
The incident had happened hours ago and Mom hadn’t been concerned enough to
pull me from school early. Maybe it had taken her a while to accept what I had
done.

My backpack slid off my shoulder and
plopped to the floor. “Urgent Care? For what?”

Mom put her hands on her hips. “You
ingested a raw crayfish soaked with formaldehyde. I need to be sure
everything’s okay.”    

“I feel fine.”

“I need to be sure. Let me grab my purse
and we’ll go.”

On the way out, I paused in the living
room. “Are we really going to Urgent Care?”

Mom turned and rolled her eyes. “
Yes
,
Arden.”

“It’s just that I was watching this movie
on TV about this girl, and the parents told her they were going shopping, but
then they ended up taking her to a mental institution.”

Mom groaned as she turned back around.
“Car. Now.”

At the Urgent Care center, I hung my head
in shame as Mom told various medical personnel about my adventures in raw
crayfish eating. They all looked as if they were waiting for us to tell them we
were joking. When they realized that had really happened, they avoided eye
contact. I was sure I would be the topic of their conversations for weeks to
come. “Hey, remember the day that crazy girl came in with her mom? Oh, you mean
the one who swallowed the crayfish in her biology class? What a whack-a-do.”

That night Mom made tuna casserole, my
least favorite meal, but I had four helpings of it anyway. I knew she’d only
made it because she was mad at me, but for some reason I was way hungrier than
usual.

Later that night when I tiptoed to the
kitchen to swipe a jar of olives, I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom
above me.

Dad was yelling, and he hardly ever
yelled. Sometimes he shouted at strangers in traffic, but never at Mom. “Stop
expecting her to be normal. She’s not. She can’t be. I don’t know why you’re
surprised by this.”

Why shouldn’t she have been surprised? I
was.

Something thumped. Maybe one of them had
thrown something. “Well, she’s got to be normal,” Mom screamed back. “She’s got
to at least try. What are we supposed to say to people?”

Of course her main concern would be what
people thought when it should have been why I’d done what I did. That was my
concern. I needed to know. And what did Dad mean when he said that I couldn’t
be normal?

They continued to argue, shouting words
that I could barely make out. One thing I did hear was something Dad said.
“Well get ready. She’s only going to get worse.”

Chapter Nine

The
following day was the worst day of school I’d had in a long time. Maybe the
worst ever. The teasing about the crayfish was relentless, as I knew it would
be. I’d begged Mom to let me stay home from school, but she said I’d brought it
on myself, so I needed to deal with it.

Fletcher
and I sat in the five hundred hallway during lunch because it was almost always
deserted at that time. We ate our lunches sitting on the ground with our backs
against some lockers. Fletcher had once again brought my lunch because I was
too chicken to go into the cafeteria on my own and, surprisingly, had gotten
lunch for himself. The only good thing about the day was that lunch was fried
chicken, the best thing the cafeteria made.

“Since
when did you start eating school lunch?” I asked.

Fletcher
looked down at his tray and examined his chicken. “I’ve been hungrier than I
used to be.”

“Me
too.” I bit into my chicken leg, watching flakes of the coating fall onto the
tray nestled in my lap. “At least the day’s almost over, but I still have to
see stupid Lacey in PE.”

Fletcher
stirred his fruit cup with his spoon. “What’s wrong with Lacey?”

I
dropped my chicken on the tray and stared at him. “What’s wrong with Lacey? Are
you serious?”

He
nodded.

“She’s
horrible to me. She’s the one who named me Dust.”

Fletcher
frowned. “You don’t like that?”

My
jaw dropped. “No, I don’t like it.” How could he not know that? “Dust is
nothing. It’s insignificant. No one pays attention to it. That’s why she calls
me that. You think I actually like that name?”

Fletcher
shrugged and stared into his fruit cup. “You answer to it. You never tell them
not to call you that, so how would I know?”

“It
wouldn’t make a difference. They’d still call me Dust anyway.”

Of
all the horrible things that could have happened at that moment, the worst
happened. Ranson came strolling out of one of the classrooms with that cocky
arrogance I couldn’t stand. I had the urge to grab my lunch and make a run for
it, but he’d already spotted us. Fletcher kept eating as if the biggest jerk to
ever walk the earth hadn’t set his sights on us.

Ranson
stopped in front of us. “Oh, look. It’s Dust and Freakazoid.”

I
immediately lost my appetite. “Why are you here? No one comes to this hallway
during lunch.”

He
smirked as if contemplating whether he should dignify my question with a
response. “I had lunch detention with Mr. Barber, but he let me out early for
good behavior.”

I
shook my head. We weren’t even ten minutes into the lunch period. What kind of
detention was that? Ranson was always getting off easy. He could be very
charming when he wanted to be. Ranson pointed to my tray. “Nice to see you
eating cooked food today. Swallowing a raw crayfish from the biology lab was
kind of, you know, beyond weird and really gross. You creep me out, Dust.”

Fletcher
continued to eat quietly, not because he didn’t care that Ranson was being a
jerk but because he had no idea Ranson was being a jerk. Ranson focused on
Fletcher. Clearly he didn’t like being ignored because he knocked Fletcher’s
tray with his foot, sending it a few feet away on the linoleum. I wanted to
slug him right in that square jaw of his.

Fletcher
looked up, blinking and waiting expectantly. Normally he would be a prime
target for an ass like Ranson, but Fletch took all the fun out of bullying. He
didn’t fight back, but he didn’t run either. He never engaged anyone in an
argument. At the beginning of last year, Ranson had cornered Fletcher in the
parking lot. No matter how many times he punched Fletcher, Fletch didn’t flinch
or move. The injured area would be red for a moment and then disappear. After a
while, Ranson looked like a fool. Fletcher made him seem like a weak person who
was not to be feared, so Ranson stopped bothering him. Unfortunately, that day
in the hallway, Ranson had no audience to keep up appearances for, so there was
no telling what he would do.

He
knelt in front of Fletcher, and I braced myself for whatever was about to
happen. “You know I really hate you, right?” Ranson spoke in a threatening
whisper. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you or where the hell you came from,
but you’re going to learn to respect me.”

In
other words,
“You’re not afraid of me, and I plan on doing something about
that.”

Fletcher
leaned over and reached to retrieve his lunch tray, but Ranson kicked it
farther away, causing the fruit cup to spill onto the floor.

“Leave
him alone.”

Ranson
curled his upper lip at me. “Shut up, Dust.”

Fletcher
stared at the juice from his fruit cup running across the floor. “You shouldn’t
call her Dust. She doesn’t like that.”

Ranson
glared at Fletcher. “What are you gonna do? Stop me if you don’t like it.”

Fletcher
only gazed at him until Ranson slapped him on the forehead, causing his head to
bounce off the locker Fletcher leaned against.

“Stop
it!” I screamed, wishing that just this once Fletcher would do something.

Ranson
threw his attention back to me. “You know I had to tell Wiley about the crayfish,
right? He’s my boy. It was only right.”

I
rolled my eyes. “What does Wiley have to do with anything?”

Ranson
stood up and backed away a little. “For some stupid reason he kind of likes
you, or at least he did. Not anymore though. You blew your only chance at
having a boyfriend, I mean one besides this punk ass.”

That
meant nothing to me since I wanted nothing to do with Wiley.

I
went back to my lunch and decided to follow Fletcher’s lead and ignore Ranson.

 “I
need to grab a bite before lunch is over,” he said as if we cared. “You losers
carry on.”

“I
hate him,” I muttered as Ranson disappeared around the corner, laughing to
himself.

“Don’t,”
Fletcher said. “He’s not even worth that emotion.”

“How
long is it going to be until they forget about the whole crayfish thing?” I
wondered aloud.

Fletcher
shook his head. “They’re never going to forget about that.”

Thanks,
Fletcher. Thanks.

That
Sunday, Fletcher would be joining my family for dinner. Mom was making lasagna
and going on and on about how it was about time I introduced the family to my
best and only friend.

Fletcher
rang our doorbell at six on the dot. I was glad he was on time because
tardiness would have given my mother something to complain about. I needed my
parents to like Fletcher. Maybe if they did, Mom would stop pushing so hard for
me to make other friends. Because of the crayfish incident, I had been totally
failing at Scarlett’s assignment for me to make a new friend. If someone hadn’t
wanted to be my friend before, they definitely didn’t want to be my friend
after The Great Crayfish Incident.

I
opened the door to Fletcher standing there, wiping his palms on his thighs. He
frowned and looked over my shoulder.

“Hey,
Fletch. Are you all right?”

He
nodded and then shook his head. What was that supposed to mean?

“I’m
just . . . a little nervous, I guess.”

Fletcher
never got nervous about anything.

“It’s
okay. It’s just my family. There’s nothing to be nervous about.” But that
wasn’t entirely true. Mom was Judgy McJudgenstein, and my little sisters
weren’t much better.

Fletcher
shifted from foot to foot. “My mom sent a coffee cake, but I dropped it on the
way. My hands were slippery, and it just fell.”

“Oh,
that’s okay. It was nice of her anyway.” I stepped to the side so Fletcher
could come in. He placed one foot in the doorway, paused and then pulled the
other inside. He took a deep breath as if that had been hard work.

I
couldn’t help but laugh because I’d never seen him act that way. “Fletcher,
relax. It’s just dinner.”

I
led him into the kitchen, where my family had gathered around the table.
“Everybody, this is Fletcher Whitelock. Fletch, this is Mom, Dad, Paige, and
Quinn,” I said, pointing to each member of my family.

Fletcher
shook my father’s hand and then took a seat where we had made a spot for him
beside me. Paige and Quinn looked at each other, giggling, and I knew it was
because Fletcher was cute. They’d seen him before but only in passing. Paige,
who had turned bright red, kept stealing glances at Fletcher, but he mostly
ignored my sisters.

“It’s
nice to finally meet you, Fletcher,” Mom said as she placed a basket of garlic
rolls at the center of the table before going to pull the lasagna from the
oven.

Immediately
Fletcher grabbed four rolls and set them in a line on his plate. “I like
bread.”

More
giggling from my sisters. Dad stared at Fletcher’s plate, and I didn’t even
want to look back and see Mom’s reaction.

Dad
watched as Fletcher took a bite out of one of the rolls but then smiled. I sat
back, relieved. Even if Mom already hated Fletcher, I knew Dad would at least
give him a chance. “So, you’re a Whitelock.”

Fletcher
nodded.

“Your
parents really keep to themselves, don’t they?” Dad asked.

Fletcher
nodded again, taking another bite of bread.

Mom
placed the lasagna on the table and cut it into neat squares with the spatula.
Dad folded his arms across his chest, and I worried that maybe he wasn’t going
to give Fletch a fair chance. “You know, we invited your parents to our
couples’ book club. They only came once and never came back.”

Where
was Dad going with this? What did Fletcher have to do with his parents not
wanting to join their boring book club? Maybe it just wasn’t for them.

Fletcher
nodded. “That’s because my dad said it wasn’t a book club. He said it was a
gathering of local pompous-ass idiots who think they’re better than everyone
else.”

My
sisters gasped, and Mom froze. My heart sank.

Dad
rubbed his chin, narrowing his eyes at Fletcher. “Did he really?”

“Uh
. . .” I tried to think of something to say to defuse the situation, but I had
nothing.

“Yes,”
Fletcher replied. “Mom said the women are worse.”

Dad
turned a deep shade of red, but he didn’t understand. Fletcher wasn’t trying to
be rude or a smartass. He was just being honest. His parents had really said
those things.

Dad
cleared his throat. “Why don’t we change the subject?”

“No,”
Mom said tightly. “Let’s not. I’d like to know. Why do your
brilliant
parents think the rest of us are idiots?”

I
slid down in my chair. Mom was pissed, and there was no turning back.

Fletcher
looked at me for a moment and then at Mom. “They think you’re idiots because
you haven’t told her yet.”

“They
haven’t told who what?” I asked.

Dad
looked as if he wanted to reach across the table and strangle Fletcher. “We’re
her parents, and we’ll make that decision. It’s nobody else’s business.”

More
riddles. More cryptic messages. Now Mom and Dad were joining in on the fun.
“What decision? What are you talking about?” Obviously the “her” was me.

Fletcher’s
eyes shifted from Mom to Dad. “You’re not her parents. You can’t be. You smell
different.”

“What?”
I asked. “Fletcher, what are you talking about?”

“They’re
not your parents,” he repeated.

Paige
burst into giggles. “I knew it. Didn’t I tell you, Quinn? I always knew Mom and
Dad found Arden in a dumpster behind the Reject Factory.”

I
threw my napkin at her. “Shut up, Paige.”

“Girls,”
Mom warned.

Dad
pointed to the door, glaring at Fletcher. “Out now.”

Fletcher
looked confused for a moment as if he didn’t understand why he was being thrown
out. Then he put the three rolls he hadn’t eaten back into the bread basket and
stood up. “Thanks for inviting me. Good evening.” It sounded so stiff and robotic
I could tell his mother had told him to say it.

Why
had Dad gotten so angry? What Fletcher said was so ridiculous you couldn’t even
be bothered by it. It was like a two-year-old calling you poopy head. Something
like that was too silly to be angry about.

I
followed him out of the kitchen. “Fletch, wait.” But he didn’t stop. He stormed
through the front door, outside, and up the walkway.

“Fletcher,
I’m so sorry. My parents—”

He
stopped and spun around. “I told you. Those people are
not
your
parents.”

“Why
do you keep saying that?”

“Because
it’s the truth. I’m telling you they’re not your parents.”