Chapter 5

After a couple of weeks, Rigby had figured some things out and fell into a routine of school activities. And he never forgot his lunch again. There were things he did at his locker every morning and things he did at lunchtime because the lines in the cafeteria were so long that some kids only got five or ten minutes to eat. He had gotten into the habit of skipping the showers and changing quickly at the end of gym class to get an early start on lunch. He was not the only one doing that. For some reason he was kind of embarrassed to be naked in front of a bunch of other boys. Besides, there was a lot of horseplay in the showers and some guys fell down almost every day or got hit with a snapped towel.

Rigby became aware that he was, compared to some other seventh grade boys, kind of skinny. He had never thought of himself that way. He didn’t have any facial or pubic hair, very small arm and leg muscles and his voice was still rather shrill and occasionally broke and made squeaking sounds. Many of the kids in the shower room had hair under their arms and between their legs. Rigby did not and now it bothered him. He didn’t know anybody he could ask about it. He wondered if there was something wrong with him.

He had begun to figure out how the school’s adolescent society worked and quickly learned there were things you did and things you absolutely did not do. You just didn’t see things, like people cheating on a test or taking a carton of milk without paying. No squealing was the unwritten, number one rule. He knew there was a small group of boys who sneaked out of the cafeteria and hid behind the hill at the back of the big playground to smoke cigarettes at lunchtime. Everybody knew that but nobody talked about it. And he knew there was a group of girls who used lipstick, perfume and eye makeup in school but did not wear it going home and always sat together in the cafeteria and squealed when they laughed. Some of them made their skirts shorter by rolling them up at the waist. Most people called them the Debs and some called them sluts. Rigby was not sure what they meant but he knew it was bad. He had also seen that some boys, usually called jocks, had peroxided their hair over the summer and now had orange or yellow crew-cuts. And then there were the motor scooter guys, mostly ninth graders, who roared around before and after school on their Cushman’s, giving girls a ride and racing each other.

At the end of the second week of school there was a Saturday night dance for seventh graders that the school called a “mixer.” It was free and the announcement promised good music and good food and free drinks. Rigby went wearing the Hawaiian shirt his Uncle Tommy had given him and his good, going-to-church trousers which he noticed were getting a bit shorter than they had been. His socks showed.

His mother had tried to explain growth spurts to him and said that was why she wouldn’t buy him expensive sneakers, Chucks, because his feet were going to grow some more. He was already wearing size eights. Rigby hoped that was true; he wanted to be taller and heavier and faster and hairier too. He often looked in the mirror to see if he had developed a muzstache.

The gym had been decorated with long streamers of coiled crepe paper and posters promoting war bonds and victory gardens. A phonograph with two large speakers, the kind used with movie projectors, was being operated by some ninth-grade boys, and they played mostly Harry James and Glen Miller records, music everybody knew. A few girls danced together, some jitterbugging and others showing off fancy steps they had learned in their dancing classes including some strange Charleston moves. Most of the boys stayed by the far wall, trading insults and jokes about the girls and most of the girls stayed near the folded wall in groups of four or five, slipping drinks and nibbling cookies and whispering about the boys.

Rigby waved to his homeroom teacher as he came in and went straight to the refreshments table and got himself a paper cup full of fruity punch and two cookies. He wandered around, half listening to the loud music and smiling at people he knew. One group of boys was talking about the Senators and the surprisingly good baseball season that was almost over while in another Sammy Baugh was being praised and compared to Sid Luckman and other quarterbacks.