Whatever Doesn't Kill You (7 page)

Simon's show is over by the time I get out of the tub. I bundle up in my flannel pajamas with the flying sheep on them and sit with him to watch
Family Guy
. It's a cartoon, but it seems truer to me than that cheesy home-makeover show. People being nasty to each other is much more realistic than people doing huge, life-changing favors for strangers.

I can feel him staring at me as I watch, and during a commercial I turn to stare back. “What the hell is your problem?”

“Buck up, sad sack,” he says. “I'm sure you and Katie will be back to best buddies first thing tomorrow.”

I give him a kick. “Piss off.”

“Suit yourself. That's what I get for trying to be nice.”

MONDAY

I'm not even out of bed yet, but I can tell it's warmer out this morning. My bed is on the outside wall of the building, and the past few days it's been ice-cold to the touch despite my having the baseboard heaters turned up high. I'm sure Emily has been nice and toasty down on the bottom bunk, on the few nights she's actually been home, but somehow the warmth just doesn't reach all the way up to my bunk.

I ignore the alarm for a few minutes, but I can't fall back asleep; the clock radio is across the room, and I have to go all the way down the ladder to turn it off. I keep it set to a multilingual station, turned up loud. I don't know what language the announcers are speaking this morning, but I guess Italian. The
DJ
sounds like Giuseppe, the plumber Simon calls when there's a mess he can't fix. Some days it sounds like people speaking Arabic, or whatever language the terrorists speak in the war movies Simon likes to watch.

I take a shower, make a futile attempt to tame my shock of hair and head out the door, wondering if I'll have any friends left when I get to school. I decide to skip breakfast—there's still a knot in my stomach after my falling-out with Katie and Griffin last night, and somehow I'm just not in the mood to put anything else in there.

I don't see any of them when I get to school, but that's not unusual. Griffin and Katie have history first thing, and I have art. Marie-Claire's in art class with me, but she's not here this morning. Again, that's not unusual: she's late half the time anyway.

We sit at big tables like in kindergarten and wait for the morning announcements. The basketball team is on a winning streak. The hockey team lost its game on Friday. The math club—the only kids at school more bizarre than my little group—is meeting after school, new members are welcome. Mr. Hogan tells the boys at the table next to mine to take off their baseball caps while “O Canada” plays, but Nate Burke whines about hat head and Quinn Ross takes his off for “our home and native land” and then slips it back on again in time for the first “stand on guard for thee.” Mr. Hogan lets it slide. Teachers let a lot of things slide with those two. It's got to be easier than actually trying to control them.

Marie-Claire slips in on the last notes of the anthem and takes her seat at my table—not beside me, where she usually sits, but kitty-corner, in the seat that usually sits empty.

“What's the matter, Frenchy, you don't want to be Canadian? Skipping ‘O Canada'?” Nate throws an eraser at her, catching her in the shoulder. “You should just go back to Quebec and separate.”

Without a thought, I jump to her defense. “She's from New Brunswick, you dumbass, not Quebec.”

“What's the difference?”

I open my mouth to point out that New Brunswick is an entirely different province, but Mr. Hogan catches my eye and shakes his head before I can says anything.

After class Marie-Claire takes off like a greased pig, dodging through the hallways like she's trying to get away from an ax-wielding farmer. I'm not sure why; our lockers are side by side and we both have to stop at them before second period. I catch up to her as she's working the combination on her lock: 20-43-16, for the record.

“So nobody's speaking to me now?”

Marie-Claire shrugs. “Look, Jenna, I just don't want to choose sides. I don't have so many friends at this school to start with, and if half of them suddenly don't want to talk to me—”

“So the majority rules, then?”

“I guess so. Look, I'm sorry. Maybe if you just apologized to Griffin and Katie…he says you told his dad Griffin's an asshole.”

“Well, he was being one, so I guess I'm not sorry for saying it. Not much point in apologizing if I'm not sorry.” I unlock my locker and pull out the embroidered drawstring bag I keep my gym clothes in. Marie-Claire grabs her math book and goes upstairs to her next class, her head tucked into her chest as she hustles toward the stairs.

I sling the gym bag over my shoulder and head off to phys ed. Apologize to Griffin and Katie? Not a chance. I'm not even completely sure what we're fighting about, but I do know for sure I'm nowhere near done being mad.

I'm sure most of the kids who don't fit in spend their days in fear of phys ed class. It can be a scary ordeal if you're not one of the skinny, athletic, popular kids. I was one of the first kids in my class to need a bra, so I've always gotten my fair share of snide comments and rude stares, but now that most of the other girls have caught up to me, it's less of a big deal. Gym in general has always been ten times worse for Katie than it is for me—not just the changeroom and, worse, the showers, but the whole process: getting picked last for teams, getting laughed at when she runs, standing in the corner when we're doing gymnastics, hoping nobody will notice she hasn't taken her turn to do a somersault because she can't make her body roll up in a little ball.

Today we're practicing basketball shots, which would be tolerable if I was partnered with Katie. There are six basketball hoops in the gym and twenty-four of us in the class, which means four people practicing shots on each hoop. Ordinarily, Katie and I would just pair up with a couple of the other losers and hide in a corner for the entire class, pretending to take shots while we talked about whatever we were going to do after school. It would be the perfect day in gym class, really. We wouldn't even have to work up enough of a sweat to have to deal with the showers afterward, which is its own special kind of hell.

But today Katie pairs up with Imogene, a special-needs kid who takes gym with us. She's a nice kid, I guess, although her conversational subjects are pretty much limited to whatever shows are popular on the Disney Channel this month. I doubt whether even the six-year-olds in Wex's class still think Miley Cyrus is cool, but Imogene sure does. She's got about ten different Hannah Montana T-shirts, not to mention an assortment of bracelets, earrings and pins that she's not allowed to wear in gym class. I guess Katie prefers hearing about what happened on Disney yesterday to talking with me today. I don't even try to make conversation; she's clearly trying to freeze me out.

“I guess I'm stuck with you, huh?”

I feel my stomach tie itself in a little knot. I recognize that voice even without turning around: Ashley Walsh. She went out with Ned Street for a while last year, which is bad enough on its own, but she's been pretty nasty to me in her own right as far back as I can remember. In third grade, she used to climb up on the toilets in the school bathrooms and look at me over the stall walls while I was peeing. Last semester, when I'd finished reading a poem out loud in English class, she tripped me on the way back to my seat, then giggled and gave this big-eyed, innocent stare to the teacher, who looked up from his desk long enough to tell me to watch where I was walking. I guess it's easier to blame the weird kid than yell at the cool one.

I look Ashley over. She's wearing Lululemon pants and a tank top two sizes too small that shows off her cleavage. I'm pretty sure the next hour will be filled with snide comments about my old running shoes and worn-out Walmart sweatpants, and Ashley “accidentally” firing the ball at my head when I'm not looking.

I shake my head. “No thanks.”

Ashley's neatly plucked eyebrows shoot up under her carefully fluffed bangs. “Excuse me?”

“I'm okay, thanks. I don't really want to be your partner.”

I can actually see her getting mad. She starts turning pink around the ears, and her chest puffs out even farther.

“Well, I don't know who you're going to be partners with then. Your fat friend is all cozy with the retard over there, and we're the only two left.”

It hits me then: something is amiss. Like there's a disturbance in The Force. Why isn't Ashley off with the rest of her crowd? Megan and Jessica and Emily, her usual gang, are off in a corner with Victoria Harper, who is usually nothing more than a hanger-on but today looks like a full-fledged member of the club. They're standing around the hoop in the middle of the gym, shoulder to shoulder, with Megan and Emily each clutching a basketball like they're about to take a shot, but it's mostly a ruse in case Ms. Robbins looks over while they're chatting. Every once in a while Victoria glances back over her shoulder to see if Ashley's still talking to me. Then she gives me a creepy little sneer and turns back to the rest of the gang.

“Miss Walsh, Miss Cooper: mixing it up today, are we?” Ms. Robbins was born to be a gym teacher. She has about fifteen different tracksuits in every color of the rainbow, and an office wall full of motivational posters with pictures of sweaty people making great tennis serves, running across finish lines, sinking baskets. She's the kind of person who actually says things like “No pain, no gain” and “Winners never quit, quitters never win” with a straight face.

As soon as she comes over, Ashley plasters on her big, fake, doe-eyed smile. “Ms. Robbins, it looks like Jenna and I are the last two without partners.”

“There's an easy solution to that, don't you think?” She claps us both on the shoulders like we're all good buddies. “Come on, girls. Let's work up a sweat here.”

“Whatever you say, Ms. Robbins,” Ashley says.

I trudge over to the wire bin that has a few lifeless basketballs left at the bottom and retrieve the one that has the least amount of give when I poke it. Ashley examines her fingernails, chewed to the quick, while I make my way back across the gym.

“So, what's going on with you and Fatty?” She takes the ball from me, gives it a bounce.

“Her name's Katie.” She and I may be on the outs, but it's still pretty low to pick on Katie's weight.

“Whatever. What's going on? I thought you two were besties.”

I shrug. “A difference of opinion, I guess. What's the story with your little club?”

Ashley's right eye twitches a little, like she's irked that I noticed. “The same thing, I guess.”

“All right. So I guess that makes us partners.”

She passes me the ball, a little harder than she really needs to, and I toss it halfheartedly at the basket. It goes right through the middle of the hoop, nothing but net, like I'm some kind of athlete.

Ashley's carefully waxed eyebrows rise in surprise. “Not bad,” she says.

After class I shower in about thirty seconds flat, then race to the cafeteria to sit at our regular table before everybody else gets there. Katie always finds some reason to hang back in gym class until everyone else has gone before she gets in the shower, and Griffin is in biology class, upstairs at the other end of the school. Marie-Claire gets there a few minutes after I do, shoots me a peeved look and finds another table. Everybody else shows up shortly afterward, glancing at me before they join her.

I dig my English book out of my satchel and pretend to read. Every once in a while I look over at my so-called friends. Griffin is laughing too loud, like he wants to make sure I notice how much fun they're having without me. I'm sure they're making plans for later and talking about what a loser I am, sitting over here by myself.

So this is what it's like to get frozen out. I can't say I recommend it.