Items lost

THE GLARING

    

    We all have boys’ names.  I think that’s the primary reason we became friends.  Sam, Chris, and Andi.  Andi with an “i,” but still--Andi.  Sam, Chris and Andi, inseparable from the age of six.  We cycled through a lot of names for our threesome over the last seven years.  They ranged from the obvious—The Three Musketeers, to the only slightly less obvious—The Three Amigos.  My favorite was the Charlie’s Angels.  

    We’re one blonde, one brunette, and one redhead, which honestly, is how I think the original Charlie’s Angels should have been.  I’m the redhead but I totally wanted to be Sabrina.  In those old 1970s episodes my mom has on VHS, it’s so obvious Sabrina is the redhead of the group.  Andi’s the brunette, Kelly.  And of course, Chris is Jill, played by none other than everyone’s dream girl, Farah Fawcett.  

    About six months after we started calling ourselves Charlie's Angels, my dad told me that when he was in high school, he had a poster in his bedroom of Farah Fawcett wearing a bathing suit.  He seemed to find the memory hilarious.  That nauseating revelation pretty much turned me off of Charlie’s Angels forever.  How dad got from Jill Monroe inside his closet door to marrying my mom is one of life’s great mysteries.  She’s a librarian.  She has glasses and a brain.  Then again, if you look up nerd in Wikipedia, I’m pretty sure you’ll see a picture of my dad, so Mom and Dad are kind of the perfect match.  I guess the bigger question is what made my geeky teenage dad want to put a poster of a ding-dong boob-monster up in his room?  And what does this mental exercise reveal about the eighth-grade boys at Beet’s Cove Middle School?  Other than they all probably have Blake Lively plastered to their ceilings.

    But I’m getting sidetracked.  This story isn’t about boys, for once.  Not directly anyway.  It’s about the glaring.  That’s the new secret name we landed on at a slumber party at Christine’s house on the first Friday after school started this year.  Andi is obsessed with animals and bugs and she knows all the weird names for groups of the same kind.  At like two in the morning, we were downing cheez balls and making Andi list all the animal groups she could think of in thirty seconds.   

    She gulped Dr. Pepper and rolled over on Chris’s giant purple bean bag.  “Um, a mob of kangaroos, a parliament of owls, a crash of rhinoceroses, a quiver of cobras—” 

    “That’s awesome.”  Chris swiped powder blue polish on her pinky toenail.  

    Then Andi said, “A glaring of cats…”  

    And it was like a prickly breeze suddenly blew through Christine’s bedroom--way eerier than when we play light as a feather or bloody mary.  The hairs on my arms stood on end. “A glaring?” 

    Andi burped.  “Or a clowder.”

    I shivered.  “We totally have to call ourselves that.”

    “A group of monkeys is a barrel,” Andi said.  

    Chris ran her thumbnail around her pinky toe, perfecting the pedicure.  “I always thought the barrel was literal.  As in more fun than.  Like they were all crammed in a big, disgusting wooden barrel.”

    “Nope.”  Andi popped the top on another can of cheez balls.

    “Did you feel that?”  I held my hands out, feeling for a tingle on my palms.  “Tell me you felt that?”

    Chris slid the nail polish onto her dresser top and fanned her toes with a copy of Teen Vogue. “Felt what?”

    “I maybe felt it,” Andi said.  She burped again.

    “When Andi said ‘glaring.’”  I shivered again.  “I felt, like…”

    “Energy,” Andi said.

    “Yes!” I burrowed into my sleeping bag.  It smelled musty.  Like a wet tent.

    “We might be kind of old for another name,” Chris said.  

    My stomach tightened.  “Really?”

    “I like it.”  Andi tossed two cheez balls into the air and caught them in her mouth.  She grinned and her braces were gunked with orange.

    Chris shrugged.  “It would make a great tattoo.”

    I think tattoos are gross, but if I was ever going to get a tattoo, I’d do it with Chris and Andi.  And it would be simply “the glaring” in tiny lowercase letters on the inside of my forearm, high enough that it would tuck inside a sleeve but every so often peek out when I raised my hand in class.  

    Our glaring was like a sisterhood.  I thought nothing could dim the glaring.  I was wrong.

    Three weeks into the school year, we heard the rumor that a new kid moved into town and was joining the eighth grade. She showed up in History class on a really rainy Wednesday in the middle of September.  I was half listening and half writing “The Glaring” on the cover of my notebook in this crazy script I’ve been working on that looks kind of like the way the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.  My handwriting is kind of what I’m known for.  I can pretty much imitate anyone’s handwriting once I’ve looked at it for a minute or two.

    Mr. Coleman was gesticulating when the door swung open.  Mr. Coleman is a big gesticulator.  The door almost whacked his hand, but he pulled it into a salute just as Mr. Crouch walked into the room.  Our guidance counselor, Mr. Crouch, is totally useless.  I think he spends ninety percent of the school day in his office eating sandwiches that leak the smell of tuna fish into the hall.  But for Becca’s arrival he decided to act like one of those guidance counselors on TV…because of the “circumstances,” I guess.  

They walked into class ten minutes late—just like they always do on television shows.  What, like new kids can’t be on time?  I’m convinced it was for effect.  If I was a new kid, I’d get to school half an hour early on my first day just so I could avoid this embarrassing ritual.  

    “Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Crouch said in his Kermit the Frog voice.  He bounced on his toes.  “It is my distinct privilege to introduce Miss Becca Carson.  Becca’s family was displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and I expect you all to give her a real Beet’s Cove welcome.”

    We stared at Becca.  What exactly was a Beet’s Cove welcome?

    Mr. Crouch scanned the room.  “Maybe some applause would be appropriate?”

    Our history teacher, Mr. Coleman, cleared a massive amount if phlegm from his throat and said loudly,     “Huzzah!”  He pushed his tortoise shell glasses up onto his nose and clapped.

    I looked at Andi.

    Andi shrugged.

    We clapped lamely.

    Becca had the kind of light blue eyes people write poems about.  Her face was round, speckled with small spots of really angry, red acne that was already, at 8:37, breaking through cakey cover up.  Her hair was brown and long with a little too much kink to be straight, but way too straight to be curly.

    She pressed her lips and forced a smile.

    I mean, what else are you going to do when a room full of strangers is clapping for you for no reason.

    “I wouldn’t say she walked here from the Superdome,” Christine hissed over one shoulder.

    Chris was right.  Becca’s faded, graphic tee was not from Wal-Mart.  Her jeans were cute and looked expensive, and she had the same boots Tracy Urban, the captain of the cheer squad, wore.

    “Or hacked her way out of an attic,” I muttered back.

    Mr. Coleman pointed to the empty desk in front of Andi.  “Have a seat, Miss Carson.”

    Becca pulled a satiny bag tight against her shoulder.  

    The fabric looked kind of Asian.  I saw Chris take note.  Everyone at Beet’s Cove Middle has a Bean backpack monogrammed with their initials. Everyone.  I said a silent prayer of thanks that my family had never moved.  Although Becca certainly appeared to be handling the weirdness well, you just knew—it sucks to be new.  As she approached us, I smiled.

    She smiled back and looked really grateful.

    Mr. Coleman closed the door behind Mr. Crouch.  I checked the clock.  Becca’s arrival ate six minutes of class—only thirty-one more minutes of copying mind-numblingly boring notes about Reconstruction off the board while Mr. Coleman lectured.  My mom is the town librarian, and my dad is a history professor.  I’m pretty sure the past can be interesting.  No one appears to have told Mr. Coleman that.

    At lunchtime, Becca came out of the line holding her tray and scanned the cafeteria.  Chris, Andi and I were at our usual table by the windows, and Ellen was with us, too.  We know Ellen from fifth grade girl scouts, and she usually eats with us even though she isn’t part of the glaring.  

    “Should we invite her to sit with us?” I asked.

    Chris forked a bite of salad.  “Who?”

    We all packed our lunches.  Chris’s mom made these amazing salads with blue cheese and dried cranberries and dressing in a separate tiny container.  I had peanut butter and jelly on wheat and a baggie of chips every single day.  I liked knowing what to expect when I opened my lunch bag.  “The new girl?”

    Andi sipped lentil soup from a Barney thermos.  Most of Andi’s possessions exist purely for irony.  “Her backpack’s cool.  I’m game.”

    Ellen waved so hard I thought her arm might fly off her shoulder.  

    Becca’s face lit up.  Her tray, containing a lump of gravy smothered meat and boiled potatoes, landed between Ellen’s and mine.  As she sat, she swung her hair over one shoulder, and it gave off a fruity shampoo smell.

    Chris made a face.  “You’re gonna want to pack your lunch.”

    Becca smiled.  “Looks better than the food at my old school.”

    Her voice was soft and twangy.  

    Ellen plonked her elbows on the table and nibbled a chocolate chip cookie.  “In New Orleans?”

    Becca shook her head.  “Houston.  We were there for about a month before we came here.  After Katrina we stayed with my granddaddy until Mama found the house here.  Then we just packed Mama’s tools in the truck and high tailed up North.”

    Chris shot me a look that screamed “is this chick for real?” 

    I twitched my right shoulder in the world’s smallest shrug.

    “What kind of tools?” Andi asked.  

    “Power tools—saws and drills and painting stuff.  Mama flips houses.  She buys old houses cheap, fixes them up and sells them.  Then we move.  We’ve lived in six houses in six years.  She always wanted to do one up north.  Now seemed like as good a time as any.”  She washed down a forkful of mystery meat with a sip of chocolate milk.

    “Cool.” Andi gnawed on a carrot as thick as her thumb.  “Where’s your house?”

    “The old Jesse House?  Over yonder on Water Street?”

    Chris giggled.  Yonder was a bit of a stretch.  I held back a smile.  Surely, any second Becca would drop the accent, crack up, and shout “Punk’d!”  But Becca faced Christine without even the tiniest trace of embarrassment in her face.  “Oh, I know.  I sound like a hick.”

    “Does everyone in New Orleans talk like you?” Ellen scootched closer to Becca.

    “Not in New Orleans, but in Texas.  I was born there.”

    “The Jesse House is really pretty,” I said.  “My mom’s been saying for years that someone should fix it up.”

    Becca’s smile cracked her face in two.  “Yeah.  If you want, y’all can come over after school and check it out.  I think my mom is knocking down walls today.”