Chapter 22: Friday at School

English class had well and truly started when I knocked on the door. Interrupting Mrs Stone in mid-rant, I handed her my tardy slip and went to my seat. Liz smiled at me from her place but then we both quickly focused on our lesson. Mrs Stone hardly ever spoke to the class like this and I wondered what was going on.

Mrs Stone resumed her rant and at the same time picked a paper off her desk. She was gesturing wildly with her free hand to emphasize whatever point she was trying to make as she walked down the room between the desks. By the time she was standing beside me, I’d figured out what she was talking about.

Apparently, when grading the essays the class had submitted last Friday, Mrs Stone had been appalled and shocked at the apparent inability of everyone in the class to write a complete sentence. It seems that there were far too many sentences written without a verb. Mrs Stone was busy telling us all how incompetent we were – except she didn’t actually use that exact word – and how important verbs are. To emphasize her point, she had taken a green highlighter pen and highlighted every sentence on everyone’s paper that didn’t have a verb. I looked around the room, and from where I was sitting, I could see lots of pages with green on them.

Mrs Stone didn’t even glance at me as she dropped the paper on my desk, thus freeing her other hand to point and wave at the rest of the students in the room. I quickly scanned down my essay, looking for sentences marked with green highlighter. There wasn’t a single one. I breathed a sigh of relief, but only a short one because there was orange highlighter everywhere. She had picked out every single comma in my essay and covered it with an orange dot. My page looked like it had a bad case of the chickenpox or something. I flipped over the page to the end to read her comment. You use too many commas – A.

I frowned to myself. It was nice that she’d given me an A for my essay, but too many commas? What did that mean? And what did she think about the actual essay? I guess an A means she liked it, but what was good about it? What parts could I have made better? I turned the page back to the start of my essay and turned my attention back to Mrs Stone.

Mrs Stone finished her rant and went back to her usual, more relaxed teaching style as she started to review basic sentence structure. It was out of character for her to talk to the class the way she had. She now held everyone’s total attention, though, and I wondered if she had done it deliberately for that reason.

I had my head up, looking towards her, listening to what she was saying. I only needed a bit of my brain to listen to her though because I already knew all that stuff. At the same time I was glancing down and reading what I’d written last week, paying special attention to where I’d used commas.

It was an essay about a tree I remembered that was outside our house back in Preston. I had some wonderful memories of that tree and the times I’d spent in its branches. It had low wide branches and was really easy to climb – at least a little way. I remember when I was five or six being able to crawl under the branches to the trunk then climb up a little bit. Then I could sit on a branch with my back to the trunk and let my legs swing free. I would be totally enclosed by the green of the leaves. Totally cut off from the world. It was like my own little house that I could retreat to when The Parents were being weird or when I’d fought with Tara or when I wanted to be alone. Of course, that was in summer. During winter, there weren’t any leaves and my little house had no walls, so it wasn’t nearly as good.

I spotted one place where I thought maybe the comma wasn’t needed and put a circle around it with my pen. By the time I got to the end of the essay, I’d found a total of three commas that didn’t seem necessary. Mrs Stone’s comment still didn’t make sense to me.

Mrs Stone started asking people to read out sentences that she’d highlighted on their page and asking for suggestions about how to fix the sentence. She did it with lots of encouragement and praise when someone said the right thing. I could almost hear the click in people’s heads as they understood the lesson and the light bulbs switched on.

I figured that people wouldn’t have understood so well if they hadn’t been paying attention, and that they wouldn’t have been paying attention if Mrs Stone hadn’t started the class with her unusual little rant. The whole thing was deliberate. She’d made everyone doubt their ability, then reminded them what to do, then showed them they really could do it the right way.

I looked back down at my essay with its outbreak of chickenpox and wondered if she was doing the same thing to me. Of course she was. A lifetime of being taught “lessons” by The Parents probably made it easier to spot what Mrs Stone was doing. That didn’t make it easier to understand her lesson. All it did was make it easier to spot that she was teaching me one.

I scanned back through my essay. There were certainly lots of commas, but I was fairly sure only three of them were actually wrong. So what was the problem with the rest? The first sentence I’d written was: Back in England, in Preston, where my family used to live before we moved here, there was a big tree outside of our house, which had lots of really low branches and was easy to climb, even for a five year-old. It was a long sentence and I was pretty sure all the commas were important. So what was wrong with the sentence? Think, Bec, think!

“Is everything all right, Rebecca?”

Mrs Stone’s voice was low, and came from right beside me. My eyes popped open in fright, and I saw that everyone in the class was looking at me. My right hand was clenched around the lump that was Nana’s locket and I realized that I’d been rocking back and forth in my seat.

“I’m sorry!” My voice came out in a whisper. Why did everyone have to stare at me like that? “I was trying to figure something out.”

Mrs Stone raised an eyebrow as a question, and I used my left hand to point down at my diseased essay.

“You were thinking about your essay and how you could improve it?” she asked in a loud voice, obviously intending everyone in the class to hear.

I nodded and dropped my head. I hated being the center of attention like this. I clutched Nana’s locket tighter and wished I could crawl inside it. I stared down at my pock-marked essay, totally conscious of Mrs Stone standing right beside me and feeling the stares of everyone in the class beating on my unprotected shoulders.

Mrs Stone walked away from me. “An activity many others in this class would benefit from indulging in. Hannah Fargo, you have now had a very long time to think about my question. Do you have an answer ready to share with us?”

Mrs Stone walking away from me and resuming the lesson seemed to take the pressure off me to the point where I could breathe again. The strange way she emphasized her comment to Hannah had caught my attention and I rolled it around inside my brain for a moment.

Then the two things came together with a “ding.” My sentence wasn’t just long, it was very long. Maybe it was too long. If I broke it up and said the same thing in shorter sentences, then I would use fewer commas. I smiled to myself, pleased that I’d solved Mrs Stone’s little puzzle.

About then, Mrs Stone wrapped up her lesson by asking, “So does anyone have any questions about verbs?”

That question was met by the expected silence, but I almost laughed out loud. I had a question. I had a question about verbs. I wondered if I was brave enough to ask it. I decided not, but my body apparently didn’t agree because my left hand slowly raised itself until it was level with my ear.

Somehow Mrs Stone noticed the movement. I’d been hoping she wouldn’t see my hand since it really wasn’t up very high.

“Rebecca Freeman, do you have a question?” I think she was as surprised as I was. She moved down the room towards me as if understanding that she might not hear my voice from all that distance away.

My right hand clutched even more tightly at Nana’s locket, and I forced myself to speak.

“What’s an intransitive verb?”

Her eyes went kind of wide for a moment. I don’t think she expected a question like that. A few people laughed and I wondered why, but she shushed them. She kept walking past me to the back of the room, and started talking.

“An intransitive verb, is a verb that doesn’t require an object.”

Well I knew that, I just didn’t understand it.

“Perhaps we should start with transitive verbs. A transitive verb requires an object. An object is the thing the verb is referring to. For example, in the sentence I read a book. The book is the object that I’m reading, so to read is a transitive verb. An intransitive verb doesn’t require an object. To sleep is a good example of an intransitive verb. Does that answer your question?”

I nodded. It really did. It was kind of like a small victory. I had this huge long list of questions in my head that didn’t have answers and I could actually cross one of them off my list. Okay, it wasn’t one of the important questions, but at least my list just got shorter by one.

“Melissa DiMartino, do you have a question?”

I blinked in surprise and turned to see Melissa lowering her hand. She’d clearly had it held right up high the way we were supposed to when we had a question.

“Can a verb sometimes be transitive and sometimes be intransitive? For example, you said to read was a transitive verb, but if I say something like I like to read, it has no object. Doesn’t that make it intransitive?”

“Now that is an excellent question.” Mrs Stone had this broad smile all across her face.

I looked around the room at the rest of the class and realized that this whole discussion was going right over the heads of more than half the people in the room.

I felt really bad that I’d started a discussion that so many of the students didn’t understand. It probably wrecked Mrs Stone’s plan too. She had them all feeling good because they’d learnt something and then I wrecked it by making her say stuff that confused them again.

I never got to hear Mrs Stone’s answer to Melissa’s question either, because the bell rang for the end of class. Everyone immediately started moving and Mrs Stone had to raise her voice to speak over the noise.

“Please submit your book reports as you leave the room. Also don’t forget that you have a new essay due next Friday. Remember that the topic is to be something related to what Thanksgiving means to you. And this time, everyone, let’s try to use verbs properly. Please? Have a good weekend.”

Book report? I had a book report due? Shit!! I forgot all about it. I was feeling frustrated and cross with myself as I packed up my books and stood up out of my chair. The pressure on my shoulders seemed to get enormous as I thought about how far behind I was going to be in my schoolwork by the time I got all the scattered pieces of myself back together again.

Suddenly Liz was beside me, her books under one arm, a completed book report in her other hand. She was bubbling with excitement.

“Hey, Bec! How’s things? How come you were late? How was your date?”

I grinned to myself. When Liz was in a good mood, she sure did have a motor-mouth. I leaned over so that we could kiss each other’s cheek and let her keep going.

“You smell nice. I like your hair like that. Is that a new shampoo? Where’s your book report?”

I scowled at that last question. “I didn’t do one. My brain’s been all scattered this week and I forgot all about it.”

She gave a puzzled look. “Yes you did. I saw you. You were working on it the night I came over. I sat in the room while you finished it. Remember? Your mother was painting. You were...” Her eyes skittered to each side of us, making sure there was no one standing near us. Then she leant in and whispered to be doubly sure that no one could overhear us. “You were doing your homework naked, remember?”

My eyes widened as I remembered. She was right. I had done a book report. My brain had once again completely flaked out on me by forgetting all about it. I wondered what I had done with it when I finished it.

Liz must have read my mind, because she immediately pointed at my English book. “I’m sure I saw you put it in the front of that.”

I opened up the book and there it was; a finished book report, all neatly typed with my name clearly shown at the top. I felt that enormous weight lift off my shoulders and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I gave Liz a huge one armed hug and kissed her cheek again. The hug was awkward because both of us were holding our books and they were all caught up between us, but I knew that she knew how much I appreciated her help right then.

The two of us joined the line to the front desk so we could hand in our assignments and leave the classroom.

“Why did people laugh when I asked that thing about verbs?” I whispered to Liz. It had been bugging me that people laughed like that when I asked such a simple question.

“It was your accent. It was really strong. You sounded much more, I don’t know, English than you normally do.”

Huh? Why? Oh! I was thinking about Nana. I was holding my locket and thinking about Nana. What a weird thing. When I listen to Nana talk for any length of time I always end up sounding a bit more like her. This time, apparently, just thinking about her had made my northern accent come sliding back. Wow!

We were at the end of the line, so by the time we got to the front, the rest of the class had left. Mrs Stone smiled warmly at me as I dropped my book report on the top of the pile.

“You’ve made two contributions to a class discussion in two days, Rebecca. I’m very impressed. Have a good weekend.”

“Thanks Mrs Stone.”

I followed Liz towards the door for about three steps, but then I stopped and turned back to Mrs Stone.

“You want me to write shorter sentences. Is that right, Mrs Stone?”

She smiled really widely, “Your sentences are properly constructed, but when every sentence is a long, compound sentence the reader can find it hard to follow what you are trying to say. There is nothing wrong with compound sentences, Rebecca. Don’t overuse them. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mrs Stone. I do understand. Thanks.” I turned to leave again, and smiled at Liz who had stopped to wait for me. Then I turned back.

“Mrs Stone?”

“Yes, Rebecca?”

“Thank you so much for explaining that. A lot of teachers, when they give me an A, they just write Good Work or something. Most of them don’t bother telling me how I could have made it better. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me. I want to be a better writer.”

Mrs Stone’s smile was now so wide it looked like her face would split open. She nodded to me.

“Have a good weekend, girls. You should get to your next class now.”

“Thanks, Mrs Stone,” we chorused. “You too!”

[I just read back over what I’ve been writing. I think I’m better at writing short sentences now. I hope so. Mrs Stone is such a good teacher.]

Walking to our next class together gave Liz a chance to ask more questions. She even occasionally gave me a chance to answer some of them. Mostly I promised to tell her more at recess. I didn’t really want to share all the details of my private life with anyone who happened to be walking next to us in the hallways.

Mr Palu was absent for Math. The replacement teacher distributed a work sheet for us to complete. I opened my math workbook and found the printout Mr Palu had given me of all the work for these two weeks. I decided it would make more sense to catch up on the work I was behind in so that the work sheet would make more sense. I put my head down and worked hard for the entire period. The math wasn’t really that complicated but I had to figure several things out for myself that I hadn’t done before. By the end of the class, I’d caught up with the class work and only had a bit to do to catch up on the homework as well. That made me feel good.

At recess, Liz and I decided that since it was such a sunny day, we should head outside. When we got out there, we found that the middle of the courtyard was completely flooded. Apparently the stormwater drains were blocked up and hadn’t coped with all the rain from the night before. A few students – mostly boys – were running around stomping on puddles right next to people to deliberately splash them. Quite a few people were getting wet legs. Some of them then started splashing through the water, chasing after the kids who’d started it. It was pretty chaotic and we started to regret coming outside. Then Liz pointed out that the basketball court was raised up a level and was completely dry. All we had to do was skirt around the edge of the flooded area and we’d be there. The only problem with that plan was that lots of other people had the same idea. The path around the edge of the flooded section was pretty narrow so a whole bunch of people were crowded closely together.

I guess we must have made too tempting a target because next thing I knew, I heard a big splash right next to me and I felt cold water splash onto my legs. I squealed and jumped sideways in a futile attempt to avoid getting wet. Unfortunately, I jumped straight into Hannah Fargo. She snarled at me and swore and pushed me hard. Because I’d just jumped, I was still a bit off balance. So when she pushed me I almost literally went flying. I flew through the air with all the grace of a whale learning to dance.

Splash!! I landed flat on my back in the middle of the deepest section of water. The water was cold and dirty. It was completely gross. I could hear loud, jeering laughter. It felt like every single student in the school was standing around me, pointing and laughing. I staggered to my feet. The water was more than ankle deep. Then I felt a second push in the middle of my back, even harder than the first. I stumbled and fell forward. I managed to land on my hands and knees, but that didn’t really help because my hands and legs caused a splash that went right up into my face and right down my front. I was soaked.

The noise of the crowd seemed to double. Faces jeered and laughed. Fingers pointed. I stood dripping in the middle, my head down. My body trembled. I couldn’t tell whether I was shaking because of being wet or cold or angry or upset or whatever. The jeering seemed so loud that I was deafened by it. I could feel the cold in my feet as the water soaked my shoes. My wet clothes were cold and clammy and sticking to my skin. I felt horrible from the wet. I felt horrible from the jeering laughter. I decided right then that this was not one of my finer moments.

There was one part that felt warm. The small hard weight of Nana’s locket was hot against my cold skin. I tuned out the insults, turning off my ears so they stopped hearing sounds. I reached up with both hands to press the locket firmly against my skin, driving its warmth into me. The warmth penetrated straight into my heart and I felt this desperate need to stand up straight. I pushed myself up, lifting my head up, straightening my spine. The only noise I could hear was the unnaturally loud beating of my heart. They were still calling out, but my brain wasn’t hearing it, leaving me wrapped in silence. My eyes opened and I found myself staring straight into my sister’s eyes.

Tara was standing there at the edge of the water, looking at me with the oddest expression on her face. Laura DiMartino had her arm slung over Tara’s shoulder. Laura’s mouth was opening and closing as she jeered at me, but I couldn’t hear a thing she said. I was cocooned in a shell of silence. Then the faces of Laura and the others blurred out of focus. There was only Tara, flanked by faceless, mindless figures jerking and twitching in their own little dance.

Tara and I stared at each other. I could see in her face that she didn’t know what to do. Part of her wanted to reach out and help me. She wanted to defend me but didn’t know how. Part of her wanted to join in the laughing – I guess I must have looked at least a little bit funny. Part of her wanted to stay in good with her friends – and to do that she would need to join in the jeering.

Tara and I stared at each other, there was no one else. The thudding of my heart was sounding like tribal drums beating out the rhythm of life.

Suddenly I started smiling at her. Out of the drumming of my heart, my brain had flashed on a memory of a play our parents had once taken Tara and me to see. It was the story of Pocahontas. At one point in the play, Pocahontas had stood in the center of a ring of people from her tribe. She had then performed a dance for her European lover who stood in the circle with her tribe. It was a dance of laughter and joy, full of spins and jumps and twists. Tara and I had loved that dance and we’d often tried to recreate it. Neither of us were good dancers and we only saw it the once, so probably what we ended up with was nothing like the original but we always had fun doing it.

Tara was staring at me, disconcerted by my smile. I raised both hands into the air, lifted my left foot high in the air then stamped it down and simultaneously clapped my hands above my head. Water sprayed out beneath my stamping foot. Tara’s eyes widened in shock and surprise. It was the start of the Pocahontas dance. She obviously recognized the move. I swung my hip around, slapped my hands down to my thighs and stamped again.

The first two steps were hard. It felt like I was pushing through cobwebs to move my arms and legs. Then it became easier. My body remembered the much-practiced moves. The excitement of the dance swept me up and carried me along. The water splashing up with each move added vibrancy to the dance as I swayed and jumped to the rhythm in my head.

I twirled and stamped, clapped and jumped, shook and wriggled. Each stamp sent up sprays of water, each sliding step sent waves rippling across the flooded paving. I closed my eyes and let myself become Pocahontas, dancing out my exuberance. In my head, I could picture my tribe surrounding me, clapping and drumming to give me the beat. I felt light and free. Sheer happiness flooded through me.

I opened my eyes and laughed in surprise. Directly in front of me, two girls with linked arms were twirling each other, laughing hysterically as the water flew in all directions. Beside them, a group of boys were doing that jumping, jumping, jumping dance that boys do – bouncing off each other’s chests and jumping again. I turned in my dance and saw others dancing and prancing in the water. Everywhere I looked I saw smiling and laughing. Then there was Tara and Laura. I stopped dancing and stood, looking at Tara with a smile on my face.

Tara was trying to hide a smile. Her eyes spoke to me. She wanted to join in but couldn’t. She wanted to clap but couldn’t. She wanted to run to me and hug me and kiss my face but she couldn’t. So she stood there, with Laura’s arm around her neck and her eyes told me where she wanted to be. Laura seemed puzzled by the change in everyone’s mood. It was as if she could see that people around her were having fun, and she couldn’t understand why. She saw me looking at her with a calm expression on my face, and sneered. Then she turned, dragging Tara with her and stalked away.

A hand grabbed mine and I turned again to see Liz standing in the water beside me, her legs soaked but her eyes sparkling with laughter.

“I don’t know if that was the most inspired thing I’ve ever seen, or if you’ve gone completely insane.”

I shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Probably the second option is the right one. But look! They stopped laughing at me.”

“Come on, we should get out of here before the teachers break this up. People are having fun and that isn’t allowed.”

She spoke too late because at that instant three teachers descended on the scene, all shouting at us to get out of the water and stop being foolish. I got picked out for special yelling at because I was completely drenched from head to foot. A woman teacher who I didn’t know told me very loudly, from inches in front of my face, how foolish I was to play around in the water like that and how much I’d regret it if I ended up sick. I couldn’t be bothered defending myself so I nodded and apologized. She seemed surprised that I didn’t argue and half-heartedly sent me off to the nurse to borrow a towel so I could dry off a bit before class started.

We detoured to my locker so I could grab my sports bag. I figured that once I got dry, I could change into my P.E. uniform for the rest of the day. Then we headed to the nurse’s office. The class bell rang as we arrived and crowds of students started heading for their next class. Liz knocked at the door for me, but there was no answer. I stood dripping in the corridor, with my arms held out from my sides, wondering what to do next. I was starting to feel really cold and clammy and horrible again.

Nurse Wanda came strolling up the corridor and stopped to look at me as I stood there in a little puddle of water, dripping and shivering.

“Hello Rebecca, what happened to you?”

“I decided to try out for the swim team,” I said with a shaky grin.

“Is that so? Last I heard, the swim team changes into their suits before they jump into the water.”

I shrugged, “I forgot my swim suit.”

“She got pushed,” broke in Liz angrily.

“Well, you better come inside then, I always keep a few spare towels in here. They seem to come in handy every so often.”

“Thank you, nurse.”

We followed her into her office and she passed out towels. I explained my plan to change into my P.E. uniform and she thought that was an excellent idea. She even pulled a little curtain across so I could have some privacy while I changed. Liz followed me in and helped me to peel the wet clothes off me. I was glad of her help because my fingers were shaking and not working properly. I could hardly undo buttons and zips, let alone untie the wet laces on my shoes. Liz had to peel the wet jeans off me like she was skinning an animal. We kind of giggled and made comments to each other all through the process. Even my underwear was completely soaked so I had to take that off too. The only thing I kept on was Nana’s locket, warm and solid against my chest. Liz asked about the locket, but I told her I’d talk about it some other time.

Thinking about it later, I felt weird about having stood completely naked in the nurse’s office at school while Liz towelled me down, but I stood there and shivered and let her dry me without thinking much about anything. I think a reaction had set in because my stomach started to cramp up and at least some of the shaking had nothing to do with being cold. Liz wrapped a dry towel around me and hugged me for a moment while I shook.

“I can’t believe I did that,” I gasped. “They were all laughing at me and then ... and then I just ignored them. Then I danced. What was I thinking? I made a complete idiot out of myself.”

I sniffled into Liz’s shoulder, but she shhhed me and held me, rocking gently from side to side.

“It was amazing. It was the perfect thing to do. You shut them up. Not everyone was laughing at you. The ones who were, they stopped laughing. You totally shut them up. It was brilliant. Bec; you are my absolute hero. Now stop snivelling and stand still so I can get you dry. We’re already late for science and you know how Gasbury gets when people are late for her lessons.”

I forced a little smile and stood away from Liz, holding my arms out so she could pat them dry. Soon I was dry and a good deal warmer. Liz helped me step into my clean panties and shorts, then handed me first my sports bra and then my school sports top to put on. The school sports uniform was some sort of throwback to the 1980s or something. The shorts were very short and skin-tight. The t-shirt had super-short sleeves and was a really snug fit. Girls were always complaining about it and trying to get it changed. The teachers always said “one day we’ll change the uniform.” They also said “one day, we’ll get a new gym.” It seemed to me they always said it the same way Mrs Gasbury said “one day another giant asteroid will crash into the Earth.”

Finally, I put on the sweatpants and sweatshirt that I’d thrown into my bag in case I got cold, and I was dressed again and feeling a whole lot more human at the same time. I would have to wear my basketball shoes for the rest of the day but I guessed that wouldn’t be a problem

Liz’s shoes were a bit wet too, but she tipped the water out of them then put them back on. She shrugged when I suggested she change into her sports shoes, “I was going to wear these for the afternoon. I’m down to do volleyball in the gym and I figured these would be fine so I don’t have any other shoes to change into. Don’t worry, I’ll sit next to the heater vents and they’ll dry out in no time.”

I hugged Liz again and kissed the side of her mouth. “Thank you so much for helping me, Liz. You’re the best friend anyone could wish for.”

She didn’t say anything. She just smiled and kissed me back.