The Hard Kind of Promise (2 page)

Yvonne, whose mother ran Mama Brondello's Cooking with Love Catering Service, looked disgusted. "You shouldn't eat egg salad. It goes bad in the heat,"
she said. "Doesn't your mom know about not making sandwiches with mayonnaise?"

"My dad makes my lunch," Marjorie said.

Alison, Zannie, and Yvonne all giggled in a nasty way. Zannie whispered something to Yvonne, who laughed out loud.

Alison turned back to Marjorie. "You need to move," she said.

"We were here first," Sarah said. She could hear the shaking in her voice.

"In about ten seconds, all the leadership people are going to get here. And there isn't enough room for all of us." Alison put her hands on her hips, which—Sarah couldn't help but notice—had begun to look like an adult's. "Do you really want to explain to them how you were here first?"

The leadership people were all the kids who were elected to school offices. There was a president, a few vice presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer. Each class also had a representative. They had a lot of meetings and decided things like whether you should have to get dressed up for the eighth grade dances or could just go in jeans. Alison was the seventh grade rep.

"Why do you have to sit in our place?" Sarah asked. She glanced over at Marjorie, wishing she would say
something, but Marjorie just smiled fiercely, the way she did when someone was being mean.

Alison sighed. "I don't want to have to explain everything," she said. "Just move."

"And fast," Yvonne said. "That egg salad smell is making me sick."

Sarah and Marjorie gathered up their lunches and their backpacks. Sarah really wished Marjorie's didn't have decals that read
SCIENCE FICTION RULES
and
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY
plastered all over it. She could feel the other girls' nasty stares even without looking at their faces.

Standing up, she faced Alison. "This is still our place. We're eating here tomorrow, no matter what you say."

Alison opened her mouth as if to speak. Sarah braced herself but was surprised when Alison closed her mouth and gave a small, smug smile, then shrugged her shoulders, as though Sarah could say whatever she wanted, but it was obvious who had the power, who had ended up with the bench.

"Marjorie," Sarah said as they ventured out onto the hot, crowded playground, "you shouldn't be so nice about letting them sit with us when they were so mean."

"Why?"

Sarah sighed. The way Marjorie didn't get things could be frustrating.

"Because sometimes, the nicer you are, the meaner they are. Don't you get that?" She scanned the schoolyard, trying to find an empty bench. "No wonder they wanted our place. Everything else is taken."

"We can sit on the edge of the soccer field," Marjorie said.

The only kids who hung out that far from the classrooms were the kids with no friends, either because they'd just moved to the school or didn't speak English or did really weird things like pick their noses or walk down the halls talking to themselves.

"I don't think we should sit out there," Sarah said.

"Why?"

It was hard to explain this kind of thing to Marjorie. The unwritten rules that everyone else understood without batting an eye just didn't make sense to her. She was always asking "Why?" or "So what?" Sometimes it felt to Sarah as though Marjorie really
was
a space alien who'd gotten lost in the universe and was beamed down to the wrong planet.

Marjorie pushed at her glasses, which were sliding down her nose. "Come on," she said. "It's hot, and I'm still hungry!"

Sarah trudged along behind her, sure that every
kid on the playground was watching them make their way across the soccer field. She decided that she wasn't ever doing this again, that even if Alison pointed a gun at her, she wasn't getting up from their bench.

The sun was hot, but she was even hotter, and it wasn't the weather. It came from misery, from embarrassment, from having been sent away, from having nowhere else to go. Ahead of her, Marjorie walked on, completely oblivious.

It occurred to Sarah that if it weren't for her, Marjorie might be the kind of kid who ate all her lunches out on the edge of the soccer field.

That was the first time Sarah had ever really thought about it. Except for her, Marjorie had no friends.

She wasn't exactly sure why. Marjorie was the nicest person Sarah had ever known. She was Sarah's favorite person. She was her best friend.

She wasn't weirder than other kids. Carl Estes screwed the head off his sister's Barbie doll and ate it once, and he had friends. They thought it was cool when he had to go to the emergency room and have an operation to get the Barbie head out.

But Carl did sports: soccer and basketball and then baseball in the spring. Sports made kids like you. Even if
you were weird or mean, other kids liked you if you were good at sports.

Marjorie was terrible at sports. She was even bad at skipping. She was the only kid who couldn't do one pushup for the President's Physical Fitness Test in fifth grade. Mr. Wheatley kept giving her more chances, which just made it worse, because all the kids stood around watching and laughing, and no matter how many chances she had, Marjorie couldn't do one pushup. Not one. After a while it felt as though Mr. Wheatley wasn't really giving her more chances. It felt as though he was punishing her.

Girls cared if you were good at sports, and also about how pretty you were and what kinds of clothes you wore. Marjorie was pretty, Sarah thought loyally. She had soft, wavy brown hair and big blue eyes and beautiful skin and a pretty smile. And her hair smelled like pineapples. But it was longer than Alison's shoulder-length hair and too wavy to stay neat. Marjorie always looked like she'd just gotten out of a convertible, the way her hair was all blown around.

Her lazy eye wasn't so lazy anymore, but her glasses made it hard to tell. And her perfect skin was pale and milky—not tan like Alison's, from being on swim team.

It wasn't enough to be pretty. You had to be pretty
in the right way. And your clothes had to be right, too. If your skirts were too short, you might look trampy. If they were too long, you might be a hippie, which, according to the popular girls, was very bad, even though no one was actually sure what a hippie was. Your jeans had to be the right kind of jeans. If you wanted to be popular, you had to have the right kind of sunglasses. If you didn't care about being popular, the worst thing you could do was wear sunglasses, even cool ones, because then it would look as though secretly you really
did
want to be popular, which was worse than not wanting to be popular at all.

There were a lot of rules, and no one explained them to you. You were just supposed to know.

The weirdest thing of all was how everyone had just decided that Alison was the most popular girl in Sarah's class. She wasn't prettier than other girls, and she certainly wasn't nicer. Most people didn't even like her. But somehow, everyone cared what she thought.

Well, almost everyone.

The day after they had to eat at the edge of the soccer field, Sarah was in the girls' bathroom between second and third periods.

The room was empty when she entered the stall, but while she was in there, Alison and Yvonne came in to brush their hair. Alison brushed her hair before every
period. While she did it, she talked about everything that was wrong with how she looked, even though you could tell that she didn't really think
anything
was wrong with how she looked. Sarah could see them through the slit in the stall door.

"My hair is so unbelievably gross," Alison said, running a brush through it, tipping her head so that her ear was almost parallel to the floor. "It's so split-end-y."

"It is not," Yvonne said. "It's beautiful. Look how smooth it is."

Sarah felt sorry for Yvonne, who had thin rust-colored hair that hung like string around her round cheeks.

"It's just, I don't know. It's not shiny enough. It's not like in those ads where the model runs her hands through her hair and it
glitters,
" Alison said.

"Like diamonds," Yvonne said dreamily. Then, because Alison was glaring at her, she said, "Your hair totally does that."

Sarah could see from inside the stall that Alison had stopped brushing her hair and was looking at herself in the mirror.

"Well, maybe a little," she said.

Yvonne, whose hair-brushing didn't take nearly as long as Alison's, returned her brush to her backpack and said, "My mom says you can put mayonnaise in your hair to make it shiny."

Alison looked horrified. "You mean, like what you
eat?
"

Yvonne nodded. "It's like a conditioner, only better. You let it sit for a while and then rinse it off. And your hair just glows."

"Really?" Alison's eyes got small and suspicious. "Have you tried it?"

"Once. I smelled like salad dressing. And nothing works on my hair," Yvonne said sadly. "But my mom swears it works. She says movie stars do it all the time. You should try it. Your hair's so much prettier than mine. I'm sure it'll work on you."

Alison shrugged, as though she had better things to do than sit around soaking in mayonnaise anyway, so why were they even talking about it? Then she laughed.

"Maybe that's what Marjorie does with all the mayonnaise at her house. That her dad's not using for sandwiches."

Sarah froze, suddenly afraid that they could see her through the slit in the door.

Yvonne snickered. "Maybe that's why it always smells around her, even when she's not eating. Maybe it's all that bad mayonnaise."

Alison shook her head, checking, Sarah could tell, to see if her hair was glittering from all the brushing.

"She is so weird."

"It's like she
likes
being weird. Like she wants to be weird on purpose."

That's not true! Sarah shouted in her head. Marjorie wasn't trying to be weird. She couldn't help it.

Alison tipped her head. "I think there's really something wrong with her. Like,
mentally
wrong."

Yvonne's eyes got big. "Really? You think she's retarded?"

Sarah hated that word. Her mom taught handicapped kids at a special school. She said "retarded" was a mean word. And that everyone was smart in his own way.

"Maybe." Alison leaned in close to the mirror, checking for pimples. "Her head's too big, don't you think?"

"I guess so." Yvonne sounded unsure. "But I have her in math. She usually knows the right answer." unlike you, Sarah thought, who hasn't known the right answer since first grade.

"Well, something's wrong with her. I don't know exactly what." Alison straightened up and gave herself a look in the mirror to make sure that she looked just the way she wanted to. "But something."

They headed for the door.

"I don't get why Sarah likes her," Yvonne said.

"Losers always like each other," Alison said.

LOSER. That's what Alison called her. A loser.

Losers were the worst. In middle school, losers were at the bottom, even below the weird kids, who usually had something going for them, like accidentally being funny in class or being geniuses. Losers had nothing.

Sarah was in shock. She couldn't believe anyone thought she was a loser. She knew she wasn't popular. But she always thought she was somewhere in the middle. A girl that most people sort of liked because there was no reason not to like her. She looked average, with almost brown hair and hazel eyes with yellow flecks in them that sometimes made them look green. There was that mole on her shoulder, but no one could even see it, except in the summer. And besides, she tried to be nice. She didn't have bad breath. She didn't smell.

Uh-oh, she thought, hurrying a little through the crowds in the hall, knowing the bell was about to ring. What if the smell of Marjorie's weird lunches is sticking to me? Maybe people think that
I
smell like tuna or egg salad.

Maybe Marjorie is rubbing off on me.

So what? she thought, trying to be like Marjorie, trying not to care. So what if Alison thinks I'm a loser? I don't even have any classes with her. I don't even see her in the halls most days.

So what? she thought, but it was hopeless.

She was still upset in chorus.

"What's the matter?" Lizzie whispered. Mr. Roche was working with the boys.

Something wouldn't let Sarah tell Lizzie. She was too ashamed, and too afraid of what Lizzie might say.

"Do you like these jeans?" she asked instead.

Lizzie gave Sarah's legs a serious look.

"Yeah. I especially like the way the pockets look."

"Really?" Sarah looked down. She had never thought about pockets.

"My jeans are heinous," Lizzie said. "My mom makes me buy them on sale."

Sarah's mom did, too, but she didn't feel like saying so just then. "Do you want to walk down to the
Juice Warehouse after school?" she asked. It was the first time she had ever suggested they do anything together. She held her breath. It was always risky to change the way things were.

Lizzie smiled. "Sure," she said. "Only I can't drink wheatgrass. Wheatgrass is heinous."

"Heinous" was Lizzie's new word. Sarah decided in that instant that she loved it, even though she wasn't exactly sure what it meant.

"I like the peach-strawberry smoothie," she said. "They'll put in extra peaches if you ask."

Mr. Roche held up his arms and snapped his fingers.

"Altos, I need you!" he said.

"Meet you at the flagpole," Lizzie whispered.

At lunch, Marjorie was bubbling with excitement.

"We get to make a three-minute film in video production!" she said before Sarah even had a chance to sit down. "It can be about anything we want! I'm going to get Louellen to make me a blue space-alien costume! She has to hurry, because the film is due the day before Thanksgiving break."

Marjorie's sister Louellen was in college. She was really good at sewing.

"Three minutes doesn't sound very long," Sarah said grumpily.

"It is long when you think about everything a director has to do," Marjorie said importantly. "Write the script. Decide what the scene will look like. Pick the cast. Pick the music—"