The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (8 page)

Kate looked at Matthew, who shrugged away Madison’s remarks, like he wasn’t interested in defending his poem. “It is what it is,” he said.

“Nice work, Matthew,” said Ms. Vickery, ignoring Madison’s hand, which had popped up again and was wriggling wildly in Ms. Vickery’s direction. “Now, who would like to read next?” She surveyed the room. “Kate?”

“Uh, I’m not sure I’m totally ready to read,” Kate said, even though she had two new Dallas songs in her binder, freshly printed out on crisp, twenty-pound bond paper in Palatino Linotype font. She was about to say, “No, maybe next week,” when she felt Matthew Holler looking at her. She turned to look at him, and he mouthed
Read
at her.
Yeah?
she mouthed back, and he nodded.

She looked at Ms. Vickery. “Uh, it’s song lyrics,” she explained. “I’ve been mostly writing songs, like I said last week.” She cleared her throat and wished her hands weren’t so shaky. “Uh, okay, I guess I’ll start reading.”

She read the lyrics to “A Little Bit of Something Sweet,” a song about Dallas running into a girl he used to know back in fifth grade, only now she’s fourteen, like Dallas, and the sort of girl like Kate would like to be, funny and smart-mouthed, nice underneath her tough exterior. She liked the chorus of the song a lot, which if she were singing the lyrics, she would have sung three times, once after each verse, but since she was speaking, she only read the chorus once:

“A little bit of something sweet
Underneath the saltiness
Tenderhearted beneath the calluses
A taste of something you can’t forget.”

Madison raised her hand. “You said ‘something’ twice. That’s repetitive.”

Kate looked down at her desktop. She noticed someone had written
MEET ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD
in red ink, and she wished she had time to think about this, what it might mean, who might have written it. Unfortunately,
she was too busy feeling like the dumbest person on Earth. Whose stupid idea had it been to join Creative Writing Club, anyway? Why did she, Kate Faber, think she could write? Now, Matthew Holler, he was clearly a writer. Everybody recognized it immediately. Kate? She was just repetitive. And the word she’d repeated, “something,” wasn’t even an interesting word. It was a nothing word—

“Are you crazy?”

Kate looked up. Next to her, Lorna was glaring across the room at Madison LaCarte, her hands gripping the edge of her desk. “That was great!” Lorna exclaimed. “I can’t believe someone our age wrote it. So what I’m trying to figure out is, why are you so critical of everyone? It’s like you think you own this club, just because you were in it last year.”

To Kate, it looked like Madison LaCarte actually crumpled, like a piece of tissue paper in the rain. Her shoulders slumped and her head drooped and the air seemed to go out of her entire body. When she looked back up, her face was flushed a deep red. “I’m sorry,” she
said in a subdued, but still sort of dramatic, voice. She paused a couple of seconds before saying, “And by the way, I know I use too many facts. I just hate to let any research go to waste.” Then she looked at Kate. “And I actually thought your song was pretty good, even if I mostly listen to classical music.”

“Thank you,” Kate said. “I think once you put a little more story in your story, it will be good too. You write good sentences.”

Madison LaCarte straightened up and beamed. “That’s what my great-aunt Phyllis always says.”

Next to her, Kate could hear Lorna stifling a giggle. Kate knew better than to look at her, or she’d start laughing too. A few seconds later Lorna nudged Kate with her elbow, and when Kate looked at her, Lorna rolled her eyes. Kate rolled her eyes back. And when she felt Matthew Holler looking at her, she turned straight around and grinned at him, a big, widemouthed grin.

Matthew Holler leaned his head back and smiled at the ceiling. Then he sat up again and
looked at Kate. He looked at her without smiling, straight on and serious, until Kate had to look away. When the meeting was over, he left again without saying a word.

That night Kate tried to write a new song about Dallas, but she couldn’t.

For some reason, Dallas didn’t seem so real to her anymore.

The next day at lunch, Kate, Marcie, Timma, Amber, and Brittany were joined by Keith Lawton, an eighth grader who managed the girls’ volleyball team and who could usually be found around groups of seventh-grade girls. Each day he chose a new table of girls to sit with and handed out advice to his lucky audience, who were usually thrilled to have an eighth-grade boy’s attention. Kate personally didn’t trust Keith Lawton. She suspected he’d been rejected socially by people his own age.

“Ladies! Ladies! Don’t everyone fight over me! There’s plenty to go around!” Keith said, scootching in next to Amber, a sack lunch in one hand, a book bag that looked like it
weighed fifty pounds in the other. “Anyone want to share their fries?”

After Keith sat down, the conversation turned to the latest school scandal. Two days before, during C lunch, a group of vegetarians had staged a protest, bursting into the cafeteria with their faces covered in ketchup, yelling, “Meat is murder! Meat is murder!” at the top of their lungs. Apparently they wanted the cafeteria to stop serving hamburgers, although that information wasn’t revealed until the next day, when there was a mediation meeting in the principal’s office.

Kate listened, half-interested, tearing the crusts of her cheese sandwich into little pieces. Keith was saying that if you wanted to make changes, you should go through the appropriate government channels, and that the vegetarians should run for Student Government instead of interrupting everyone’s lunch.

“I’m going to run for a seventh-grade representative seat,” Marcie announced, which was news to Kate. “I think there are a lot of changes that need to be made at this school.” She
looked expectantly at Keith, waiting for him to approve of her decision, but he was looking off in the distance and not paying attention to Marcie’s political ambitions.

“Oh God, look who it is.” Keith pointed down the aisle between cafeteria tables. He rolled his eyes. “Kelly Fisherman. Why her parents don’t send her to some kind of clinic is beyond me.”

Kelly Fisherman weighed around two hundred pounds and had weird skin growths on her neck and face. In Kate’s opinion, her personality was even more of a shambles than Madison LaCarte’s. Kate thought that even if Kelly Fisherman were thin as a rail, she would probably not be a very popular person. She had a terrible temper and actually yelled at people when they made her mad, which Kate had seen her do just the week before, after a girl had missed a really easy basket in PE.

Nobody liked Kelly Fisherman, including Kate, and Kate felt bad about this. She was uncomfortable disliking anyone, having been disliked herself, but Kelly made it very hard for
you to like her or even feel fondly toward her. All that was left for Kate to feel for Kelly Fisherman was sorry.

This was especially true two seconds later, when someone stuck a foot out and Kelly Fisherman went flying. The cafeteria was suddenly a volcano of laughter and hoots erupting everywhere. Keith Lawton was one of those silent laughers, Kate noticed. His mouth was open and his head was moving up and down, but no sound came out of him. Nevertheless, it was clear that he was very much enjoying the spectacle of Kelly Fisherman lying splat in the middle of the aisle, the contents of her tray rolling everywhere.

In the middle of the pointing and the hooting, Kate noticed a tall boy standing at a table a few rows away from the commotion, his palms flat down on the tabletop so that he was leaning over it, talking intensely to a scrawny kid with white blond hair and pimply skin. With a shock, she realized it was Matthew Holler. She’d never seen him in B lunch before. For a few seconds the commotion didn’t seem
to touch him, but finally he turned his head toward Kelly, who was still on the floor, too stunned to move.

Matthew Holler studied the sprawling figure of Kelly Fisherman on the cafeteria floor for a moment before turning back to his friend and flashing him the peace sign. Then he walked toward the lunch line, circling around Kelly, who was slowly rising to her feet and dusting herself off.

Kate watched as Kelly picked up her chips and her plastic-wrapped cookies, but abandoned her hamburger, which had flown off her tray and landed underneath a table. She seemed to be pretending that her two milk cartons, now leaking in the middle of the aisle, had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

After collecting her tray, Kelly Fisherman sat down at an empty table and began eating. Kate picked up her own sandwich, but was too distracted to eat it. Was Matthew Holler in B lunch? How could she not have noticed that before? She was searching her brain like crazy to think of other times she might have seen
Matthew in the cafeteria when she saw him returning from the lunch line, walking down the aisle like he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, just heading off somewhere after lunch. But as he passed Kelly Fisherman’s table, he dropped two plastic-wrapped sandwiches on her tray. Kelly gave him a puzzled look and muttered a barely audible “Thank you,” but Matthew was already halfway out the cafeteria door before the words left her mouth.

Kate was wondering if she was the only one who’d witnessed this amazing act when Keith Lawson said, “He is so weird.”

“Who’s so weird?” Marcie asked eagerly, turning her head left and right, looking for potential weirdos.

“Matthew Holler,” Keith answered, as though it were obvious. “He lives on the next street over from me and we used to play together when we were kids, but now? Forget it.”

“What was he like?” Kate asked, eager now herself for information. “I mean, when he was a kid?”

Keith gave her a strange look. “He was like a kid. Why do you want to know?”

Kate shrugged. “He just seems sort of cool.”

“He gets in trouble all the time,” Keith told her. “He used to be gifted, but now he just does regular classes. All he cares about is music.”

That’s when Kate knew that somewhere in his closet, Matthew Holler had a pair of boots that made his mother sigh and roll her eyes whenever he put them on. In fact, at that very moment, Kate felt like she knew everything worth knowing about Matthew Holler. She knew he thought different was good. She knew his fingers were calloused from hours of playing guitar, pressing down hard on the bottom two strings at the first fret with the tip of his index finger, doing it forever just to get the F to sound right. She knew so much about Matthew Holler that it didn’t surprise her one bit when he came back into the cafeteria and walked up to her table.

“I want you to hear something,” he said. “You got a minute?”

Kate nodded and stood up, abandoning her
lunch. She ignored the murmur of questions coming from Marcie, Amber, Brittany, and Timma. She ignored Keith Lawton’s snort of disgust. When Matthew reached out his hand to her, she took it. She held it like a present. She tapped her fingertips against his fingertips and knew what she had always known, from the very first time she’d set eyes on him.

“You
have
to do this.”

Mazie shoved a fluorescent yellow sheet of paper in Marylin’s face.
STUDENT GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS!
the headline practically shouted at Marylin.
BE A MOVER AND A SHAKER! MAKE DECISIONS THAT MATTER! REPRESENT YOUR CLASS!

“Why do I have to do this?” Marylin sat up from a hamstring stretch and tried to lean back out of Mazie’s range. The way Mazie was waving that sheet around, someone was going to get a paper cut.

“Because we need representation!” Mazie threw her hands in the air like a politician making a speech, her voice bouncing over the
gym’s hardwood floors. “Our cheerleading uniforms are a joke. We look like kindergarten cheerleaders. And we need our own van for away games. And money so we can enter competitions.”

“But what does that have to do with me?” Marylin asked, lying back on the mat and pulling one knee up to her chest. “Or with Student Government, for that matter?”

Mazie held up a finger. “One, Student Government makes recommendations to the school administration and the
PTA
about how much money should be spent every year on clubs. Cheerleading, for your information, is a club.” She held up a second finger. “Two, you’re our best candidate. None of the eighth-grade cheerleaders wants to run for Student Government because they’re practically in high school and couldn’t care less anymore. So that leaves you.”