Chasing Orion (19 page)

Five days later, I was off to Crooked Creek School, and Emmett to Westridge High with all his old friends. Except for Evelyn I didn’t know a soul at Crooked Creek. It was good that I was one of the first kids on the bus. It would have been terrible getting on toward the end of the bus route and having to face all those new kids in one big clump. I did not go straight to the back, because I knew that those were the seats the kids really liked the best. It was where they could cut up and flirt and tell dirty jokes without the bus driver hearing. There was no chance of Evelyn being on this bus, as her house wasn’t on this route. So I sat right down in the seat directly behind the bus driver and scrunched myself as close to the side as possible. I had one goal: not to be noticed.

It wasn’t long before lots of kids began to get on. At one stop, about six girls came onboard chattering away, their ponytails bouncing. They headed right toward the rear of the bus, clomping down the aisle in their new saddle shoes. I could see in the driver’s rearview mirror other kids scattering from the coveted rear seat as these girls approached. In addition to the saddle shoes, they were dressed almost identically. Every single one of them wore a short-sleeved Ship’n’ Shore blouse either with a skirt or jumper. They were dressed in the latest cool styles. I was sort of glad that Evelyn wasn’t on this bus. I didn’t even want to imagine what her first-day-of-school outfit would look like. They also were all fiddling with the little glass spheres that hung on gold chains from their necks. These were mustard seeds that were enclosed in glass balls, and they were the latest rage, but mostly among high-school girls. All of them were huddled together whispering now.

“Hey, sit down, back there!” the bus driver yelled. One girl had stood up to join the huddle.

We got to school way too quickly. All the girls rushed forward before I could even get out of my seat. I knew as soon as I got to school that I would hate it. I didn’t like the school building, which was dark and old-looking, and all the Mustard Seeds were in my class.

Evelyn was in my class, too, however. Her bus had arrived before ours, and there she was in Room 22 standing by her desk in the same laundry-bag dress she had worn the first day I met her at the library. It had these huge patch pockets on the front that she claimed she liked because she could put stuff in them. She could have gone camping and had a week’s worth of provisions in those pockets. And as if the dress wasn’t bad enough, she had added a beret! I guess to cover up the perm that still had several inches to go before the last frizzy traces would be history. “Wanna sit next to me?” she asked. “I saved you a place. Teacher said we could sit wherever we want.”

“Sure,” I said. I knew right then that my fate had been sealed. My destiny fixed. I would remain on the fringes, if that, of the popular kids. But I felt a certain defiant pleasure at the same time. I didn’t want to be with those Mustard Seed girls. They weren’t nearly as neat as my old friends anyhow.

We each had to stand up and say our names and one thing about ourselves that no one would know just by looking at us. For instance you couldn’t stand up and say, ‘My name is Carole and I have straight blond hair.’ The teacher, who had a face like a prune — dried, not canned — began with the Mustard Seeds.

“My name is Amy Moncton, and I like fashion.”

“My name is Patty Werthheimer, and”— giggle, giggle —“I like fashion, too.” By the time it came to the fourth Mustard Seed, the Prune said, “No more fashion. Think of something original.”

“My name is Linda Dorf.”

“Dwarf?” one of the boys said. There was a roar of laughter. This did not faze Linda. She spun around and glared at him. “No, the name is Dorf,
D-o-r-f.
” If that had been me, I would have vaporized on the spot. But these Mustard Seeds were something else. Then she cocked her head almost flirtatiously and said, “In addition to liking fashion, I think Grace Kelly is the most beautiful woman in the world.” I dreaded when my turn would come. I frantically tried to think of something I could say about myself. Evelyn was next, then me. She stood up, engulfed by her dress. She had taken off the beret because you were not permitted to wear hats in class. Her hair, though somewhat improved, still looked pretty bad. It was as if the electrified frizzle was hooked up to a lower voltage. “My name is . . .” But she spoke so low that even though I was sitting next to her, I could hardly hear a word. I suddenly felt terribly sorry for her. I realized that Evelyn, who was so confident about a lot of things, was absolutely terrified now. This was a new school for her as well.

“Speak up, dear,” the Prune said. As soon as a teacher calls you “dear,” you know you’re in trouble. You become an instant object of pity in the eyes of everyone else in the classroom. “My name is Evelyn Winkler, and I like reading books.” She sat down very quickly. I couldn’t help but look at her now. Everything was wrong with Evelyn Winkler. She wore glasses that belonged on the face of a grandmother, not even a mother. Her name was an old-lady name. Who named a baby Evelyn? And her dress looked like it had belonged to some very dowdy grown-up woman. The kind of woman that maybe works in a city office inspecting records. I once had to go to the department of motor vehicles with my mother, and there was the grayest bunch of little old ladies with gray hair and bad permanents behind the high counters shoving forms through little slotted windows. I mean, even my grandmother dressed more fashionably than Evelyn.

But now it was my turn. “My name is Georgia Louise Mason. But people call me Georgie.” I began to sit down.

“One minute, Georgie,” the Prune said. “Don’t you want to tell us something about yourself that we wouldn’t otherwise know?”

“I just did.”

The Prune blinked. “What did you tell us?”

I was halfway between standing and sitting. “I told you that people call me Georgie. You didn’t know that before.” There were some giggles from the back of the class.

Then I heard someone whisper, “Her name, is that all there is to her? Wow!”

“No, triple wow. She has three names!”

There was a ripple of giggles from the back of the room. I felt something begin to wither inside me. Then to add insult to injury, the Prune sank me with the
d
word. “That’s true, dear, but could you tell us something more?”

So I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. “My next-door neighbor is in an iron lung and she’s very beautiful and fashionable!” I plopped down in my seat. There was a collective gasp that swept through the room like a rogue wind and then giggling shrieks.

“Quiet! Quiet! Class!” The Prune slammed her palm on the desk. “There is nothing funny about being in an iron lung. Nothing at all.”

Oh, Lord, what had I done? Why had I ever said that? I just closed my eyes. I wanted to dissolve. I wanted to vanish.

Arithmetic was our first class. The Prune was trying to figure out what we knew. So she put some fractions up on the board and then wrote them as decimal points and wanted to know if we knew how to do that. So she put up another fraction. No one raised a hand. I knew, but I wasn’t going to raise my hand. I looked over at Evelyn. She knew too. I could see her writing it on a piece of paper, but she wasn’t going to raise her hand either. Safety in silence.

Things did not improve at recess. The Mustard Seeds had brought jump ropes. They were very good. They knew all the jump-rope rhymes.

Then they all started counting. Amy Moncton was jumping as her mustard seed glinted in the sun and flopped rhythmically against her chest. Evelyn and I just watched.

“Aren’t you broiling in that outfit of yours?” a Mustard Seed asked me as we lined up to go back into school.

“I’m fine.”

She turned to the other girls clustered around her and began giggling.

The second day of school was just as awful. A girl named Charlene pointed at my feet and said, “Oh, look, she’s wearing those socks again — anklets!” All of them had thick socks that rolled over, making a nice cuff at the top of their brand-new saddle shoes. I did not have saddle shoes. I wore sneakers because they were more comfortable, and thin socks. I was simply mortified. When I got home that day no one was there because Mom had an after-school meeting.

I decided to call Phyllis. “Phyllis?” I felt this huge lump swelling in my throat.”

“What’s wrong, Georgie?”

“Everything. Can I come over?”

“Sure.”

She was in the sunroom. The tears were leaking down my face.

“What is it, Georgie?”

“Phyllis, school is so awful. I tried, I really did. I know it’s only been two days, but these girls are mean and horrible. They think they are so great. They all dress a certain way and they think I’m weird. And they all wear mustard seeds and saddle shoes with thick socks and I . . . I . . . d-d-d-don’t even own saddle shoes.” Then I felt so terrible. I mean, here was poor Phyllis who two weeks before had had some sort of seizure when they tried to wean her. Imagine crying to a young beautiful teenage girl in an iron lung about not having a mustard seed and saddle shoes and thick socks.

“Oh, Georgie.” There was the hollow sound she made when she sighed.

At that moment, Emmett came in.

“Emmett, take this girl out and buy her some saddle shoes, thick socks, and a mustard-seed pendant.”

“Huh?” Emmett said. He looked at me

Sally had come in and said that she knew there was a sale going on at L.S. Ayres department store.

“You mean, all the way downtown?” Emmett said.

“Yes!” Phyllis said. “Come on, Emmett. This is important.”

I was still snuffling wetly, hiccuping and stuttering out rags of sentences. It was fairly ridiculous to think that a mustard seed and saddle shoes could have enhanced my appearance that much, or my dignity in the eyes of my Crooked Creek peers.

“OK,” Emmett said. So we were off.

“Oh, yes,” the saleslady was saying. “All the girls want to wear mustard seeds. How they ever get that little tiny seed into the glass ball, I’ll never know.” Emmett and I were standing at the jewelry counter in the department store, looking at the display of the mustard seeds trapped in what appeared to be solid spheres of glass. “I’ve sold over fifty of these in the last week alone. They are the rage.”

“So which one do you want, Georgie?”

“There’s quite a price range,” the lady offered. “It depends on the quality of the glass and the size of the seed, and of course if you want a gold or silver-plated chain.”

“We better go for one of the less expensive ones,” Emmett said. I stood staring at them. I certainly couldn’t tell the difference. But suddenly I didn’t even care. “I’m not sure,” I said.

“Come on, decide,” Emmett urged.

“I can’t.”

“Look, this is not an earthshaking decision.” The saleslady walked away.

“Yeah, that’s just the point,” I muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that I don’t think that me buying this is going to change anything.”

“Whoever said it was?” Emmett asked. He looked confused.

“Look, never mind. I don’t want it. The saddle shoes you got me are fine. Enough.”

I didn’t want to explain it all to Emmett, but all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be included with the mustard-seed girls. As a matter of fact, coming home in the car, I thought I might wait a day or two to wear my new saddle shoes. I could just start with the socks tomorrow and my old sneakers.

By the end of the second week of school, one good thing had happened. They changed the bus route a little bit. So now Evelyn was on my bus. At least I had someone to talk to. We avoided the Mustard Seeds as much as possible. During recess we discovered this big anthill at the edge of the playground, and this was where we had our longest talks, just looking at this anthill. It sounds dumb, I know, but Evelyn made it all very interesting. She knew a lot about ants, it turned out, because her grandfather was an ant specialist and taught at Indiana University in the ant department or something like that. There was a big word for what he did. One of those “ology” words. But it was just easier to think of it as ants. So we would sit there and poke
T
sticks into the holes, just to disturb them a little bit, not to wreck their houses or whatever it was under there, but just to stir them up a bit. Then a few would come trailing out. Evelyn started saying things like —“That’s a minor worker,” or “That’s a major worker,” or “Those over there are soldiers.”

“They all look the same to me.”

“Nope — all different castes.”

“What do you mean by castes?”

“Just different groups in the one big group. They all do different things in the anthill. Some work; some fight. Some just sit around and make babies. Well, really only one — the queen. She’s got the biggest ovaries. So that’s why she’s the queen.”

“Ovaries?”

Evelyn looked at me. “You surely know what ovaries are?”

“Sort of, but not exactly.”

“Women have them. They have the eggs. Do you get your period yet?”

“The curse?”

“Yes.”

“No, do you?”

“No.”

I was so relieved! Evelyn continued talking. “You start to get it when your ovaries start sending out those eggs.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I knew that. But how come this ant is the queen? Aren’t there other girl ants with ovaries?”

“Not as big as hers. Anatomy is destiny.”

“Huh?”

“Just a saying. I don’t really believe it. At least not with people. Probably it’s true with ants.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This, of course, was what I liked about Evelyn. I could be completely honest with her.

“What don’t you understand?”