Flying Lessons & Other Stories(16)
I cringe for the new girl. This would all freak me out if it were my first day. But she doesn’t even blink.
She’s from California.
“For instance,” Miss Lee says, “Kaylee is Sunshine, and Kyle H. is Slugger, and Aadhya is Mistletoe. So before you can play the game, I’ll need you to—”
“Blade,” the girl says.
“I’m sorry?”
On cue, a few of the boys begin telling Blade-themed jokes. But Blade looks at them like that one blank-faced emoji that doesn’t have a mouth. And they stop.
“Blade is my elf name.”
She steps farther into our circle, and I notice Blade’s got on amazing military boots that are all scuffed up. Those won’t be around past day one. We girls are required to wear Mary Janes.
“Well, then,” Miss Lee says, not sounding peppy anymore. “Blade.”
You can tell Miss Lee is bothered to have an elf called Blade on her watch, but that’s not the important part.
The important part is that as I’m thinking how fun it will be to sled with my best friend, Henry, this weekend, and how excited I am to see Dad for Christmas, and mostly how wicked the new girl’s boots are, at the very same time I reach into the hat and somehow pull out the name Blade.
The period bell goes off right as she and I lock eyes, tight like matching puzzle pieces, almost like she can tell I picked her.
—
Rumors spread in the lunch line like a common cold.
Blade has a knife collection. Blade has a pet snake. Blade has three pet snakes. Blade feeds her pet snakes live rats, which she personally catches in the attic…of her haunted house. And the most shocking rumor of all: Blade called her teachers by their first names at her old school in Berkeley.
“I’m telling you,” Henry says, in between bites of chicken fingers. “Reagan said J. J. O’Reiley lives across the street from the new girl. Apparently, her family moved in over the weekend and they are super weird.”
“?‘Weird’ can mean anything, Henry. Everyone calls us weird.” I’m glancing around the cafeteria, swirling a tater tot in some Italian dressing, and feeling glad that nobody ever sits with me and Henry. I love having a big table to spread out my art notebooks and draw. I don’t even care if Henry spills various sauces on my drawings, which he always does, because then I turn the sauce splotches into cartoon characters.
“Okay, true,” Henry says, “but I think this girl is, like, genuinely weird. Did you see her boots?”
Not only did I see them, I want a pair. “I think they’re pretty wicked,” I say, and I’m proud of myself. I said it loud enough for Henry to hear me the first time.
The monitor whistles. Lunch is almost up. We eat in twenty-two-minute marathon sessions, and I always walk into life science with a bellyache. But today I barely ate a thing.
“Well, whatever,” Henry says, gulping his strawberry milk away in two chugs. “As long as you don’t replace me as your number one friend.”
“Aw, Henry,” I say, standing with my tray to gather my notebooks. “I think of you as more of a pet than a friend.”
He acts all offended, but then he does his famous baboon snort and we both laugh.
“If I’m your pet, then can I finish your tater tots?”
I hand over my tray and roll my eyes, but Henry’s the best—even if I can’t quite trust him with the secret that I’m Blade’s Santa. When Henry’s got a secret to keep, he looks like he has to pee. Frankly, it’s a liability.
“Gosh,” he says, smacking his lips, “I would marry tater tots if I could.”
The official bell goes off, and the whole cafeteria shrieks and groans—but nothing can get me down now. I’ve just got life science and then band practice and then Mom is taking me last-minute Christmas shopping for Aunt Hannah and Miss Lee.
And also, the new girl. Who I can’t seem to stop thinking about.
—
The mall is a zoo, if the zoo forgot to build cages.
Half the shops are permanently closed, and the food court is a war zone. But after we pick up an Applebee’s gift card for Miss Lee, Mom beelines straight for a boutique that’s within the price range of our Secret Santa rules.
“What about this, Sammy?” she says, holding up a mini makeup kit that’s right by the front of this quirky pop-up shop. Mom calls me Sammy because she knows I hate Samantha, and she knows I prefer Sam, and so Sammy is kind of “in the middle.” We are working on being in the middle with one another.
“Maybe,” I say, and Mom goes, “Speak up, Sammy,” and I say, “Maybe.”
That right there is a good example of me being in the middle, because I wanted to throw the makeup against the wall and shout, “Blade doesn’t need makeup to be cool!”
“Well, I’ll hold on to it,” Mom says, making apology eyes at the cashier. “Unless you find something better.”
But I don’t find something better, is the problem. I go up and down the aisles, and I find things that I could use—like these turquoise dragon earrings that might distract people from my giant ears, or this mini embroidered DIVA pillow that would be a good bed for my bunny, Sir Hop-a-Lot—but none of it seems very Blade.
“Samantha?” I hear from the front. I’m allowed out of my mom’s sight for about ten seconds for every year I’ve been alive.