2
Creepy things about tenth grade: Mr. Fischer, my chem teacher, had a snake. Some people thought it was cool. I wasn’t one of them. I had nothing against snakes per se. The thing that bothered me about it was that I knew Mickey ate mice.
Yes, Mickey. That was the name Mr. Fischer had chosen for the black, scary creature that regularly constricted around real-life Mickeys before swallowing them whole. I’d never actually seen it happen, but one girl had run into Fischer at PetSmart. When she’d complimented him on his cute mouse, he’d told her, “Don’t name the food.”
Me, I had a soft spot for mice. Once, when I was little, we’d had one in our house. Mother had talked about hiring an exterminator, but before she could, I saw it run across our family room, in front of the TV where I’d been watching (by some great coincidence) Stuart Little. “Get him!” I’d screamed, and Daddy had thrown a blanket, immobilizing the tiny, scared creature. It was brownish-gray, with big brown eyes. I’d named it Stuart and wanted to keep it as a pet. We’d compromised on releasing it at a nature preserve near the house.
So, today, I was having a hard time concentrating on our density determination lab because there was a PetSmart bag on Fischer’s desk.
The guy in front of me nudged his friend. “Looks like it’s feeding time.”
“Cool!” his friend said. “Are you going to come after school and watch?”
Ick. Someone should really do background checks on these boys.
Kendra nudged me. “Earth to Emma.”
“What?”
“Did you finish measuring?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m sorry.” Had that bag moved? No, it must be something else. Who would put a mouse in a closed plastic bag?
“I’ll do it now,” I told Kendra.
“It’s okay.” Kendra took the paper from me and wrote down the number. “Now we’re supposed to add water.”
It did move.
“Water, Emma.”
“Oh, sorry.” I picked up our container and managed to spill pretty much all of it. I grabbed some paper towels and wiped the filthy linoleum. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. What’s with you today?”
“Sorry.” From the floor, I stared up at Mickey. His beady black eyes stared back, and I thought about what it would be like to be a mouse. “It’s just … the mouse on Fischer’s desk.”
Kendra followed my eyes. “What makes you think there’s a mouse there?”
“The bag.” I gestured toward it. It moved. Definitely. “Did you see that?”
“It could be anything in that bag.”
“Like what?”
Kendra shrugged and went to get more water. When she came back, she said, “Fang clippers, snake scale medication. I don’t know.”
“It moved.”
“I guarantee there’s no mouse in that bag.”
“Right. How do you do that?”
Kendra poured the water, then gestured at my purse, which was lying open on the floor. I glanced down. Something small and white was moving inside. “I think he made a break for it.”
I shrieked. Kendra’s hand landed on mine, too late. Heads turned to stare. Kendra said, “Relax, Emma. Mr. Fischer would never give us flammable liquids.” She picked up the container of unknown liquid and measured some into our cylinder. “See?”
“Oh, silly me.” I tried not to look down at my purse. “I thought I saw smoke.” I laughed. “False alarm.”
When people finally looked away, I picked up my purse. “How’d it get there?”
Kendra shrugged. “Guess he ran.”
I stuck my finger inside. The mouse nibbled on it. It felt like the teeth of a comb. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I don’t know. Give it back to Fischer.”
“Never.” I petted the mouse’s soft, bony body with my fingertip. I’d already mentally named him Ralph, for Runaway Ralph from the book. After all, he’d run away. No, this was crazy. How could I steal a mouse?
How could I not?
“Put him in here, quick,” Kendra whispered. She reached into her own overstuffed backpack and pulled out a mouse-sized box.
I took it and, with my pen, punched some holes in the top. I didn’t ask Kendra how she happened to have the box. She often had strange things in her bag, like foreign coins, antique opera glasses, or once, a preserved butterfly. Careful to keep my eyes forward, I scooped the tiny creature into the box, shut it, then stuffed it into my backpack while Kendra recorded our result.
“Okay,” Fisher said. “Everyone done?”
A chorus of yeses and nos. Fischer strode to his desk. “Finish up.”
That’s when he noticed the flat, empty bag. He patted it. His eyes widened, and he started moving objects on his desk.
“Did you lose something, Mr. Fischer?” someone asked.
He didn’t answer. Someone else said, “Did you lose the mouse?”
A girl screamed. Kendra said, “Don’t be stupid. He couldn’t have lost a mouse. That would be terribly irresponsible, and Mr. Fischer would never be so careless on school property. He always tells us, safety first. Right, Mr. Fischer?”
Fischer stopped patting his desk and said, “That’s right. I just misplaced … my keys. Oh, here they are.” He held them up. “False alarm.”
I was practically hyperventilating by then. Kendra rubbed my back. “Calm down. There’s only one period left. You saved a life.”
At her touch, I felt instantly calmer. My heart, which had been racing like a rabbit’s, slowed down. I drew a deep breath. It would be okay.
Next class was journalism, my favorite part of the day. After eighth-grade solo tryouts, Lisette had gone on to become a total star in chorus and drama. She’d even gotten the lead in the eighth-grade play. So I’d switched to newspaper, figuring she’d have no interest. Turned out, it was something I actually rocked at. From the exposé on which world history teacher was the easiest (definitely Mr. Kalevitch, who played Beatles music and ditched textbooks for a PowerPoint presentation) to the political scandal when a student government candidate tore down his opponent’s posters, I’d cracked them all. This year, tenth grade, I was creative writing editor for The Panther. Next year, I expected to be editor in chief.
On the way to class, I ducked into the girls’ bathroom and checked on Ralph. His box was a little crushed, but he was fine. I had a pet!
I got to class late, but Ms. Meinbach, the teacher, liked me, so she said, “Oh, good, you’re here. I was hoping you could help our new student.” She gestured toward a red-haired boy. “He’s interested in creative writing. Emma, I’d like you to meet…”
I didn’t even hear the next words out of her mouth because he turned. The room froze like a broken DVR. It was Warner.
He started to smile, then stopped. “Hey, I know you. Eighth grade, right?
My face felt hot, then cold. Warner! I tried to say … something, to explain what had happened at the hoedown, but it came out as a cough. Then another. I was going to choke to death right in front of him. Or die of embarrassment.
“Are you okay?” He pulled a chair toward me and gestured for me to sit. I nodded, and he saw me. “Hey, you’re Emma Bailey, right?”
I breathed in. “Yeah. Warner. I thought you moved.”
“I did. We moved back.”
“Cool.” I nodded a few times too many.
“So what do we do around here? I was on newspaper at my old school, but I did sports.”
He didn’t say anything about the hoedown. Was it possible he didn’t remember, that the experience was so insignificant that he didn’t care? Maybe. Still, I wanted to explain.
“That time at the hoedown…”
He looked down. “We don’t have to talk about that.”
“I want to. For two years, I’ve been wanting to tell you what happened.”
“It’s okay. Really.”
“My friends, they had me arrested.”
His left eyebrow kinked up. He
had no idea what I was talking about.
“At the hoedown, you could pay a dollar to have someone arrested. Then they’d pay a dollar to get out. Except I didn’t have my purse, so I had to stay and stay, and when I finally got out, you were gone.”
I sounded crazy. What if, after all this time, he thought I was crazy?
But his expression turned to a smile. “You’re talking about when I asked you to go on the hayride. When you blew me off?”
“I didn’t blow you off on purpose. I totally wanted to go on the hayride with you. I was so mad. I even broke out of jail, I was so upset about missing it.”
He shook his head. “You’re kidding.”
“I looked for you at school the next day, the next week, even the next month, until I heard you moved, but I never saw you.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I was avoiding you. I felt so stupid. I figured you’d been joking when you told me you’d come. You were there with all your cool friends, and I thought you were laughing at this dorky guy who’d invited you on a hayride, like we were in a production of Oklahoma! or something. What a nerd.”
“No. I love Oklahoma! That’s exactly the type of thing I like, and I thought it was cute. I really wanted to go. I… I liked you. A lot.”
Kill me now, I am such a geek.
But Warner said, “I liked you too. You busted out of jail? Is that what you said?”
“Hoedown jail. I ran past all the PTA moms. They were chasing me. It was seriously like a video game.”
He laughed.
Ms. Meinbach was walking around the room, checking how everyone was doing. I pulled some old issues of the paper toward me. “So, we try to have three or four poems in every issue. The staff writes most of them, but if a student submits one, we look at it. We encourage student work.”
Ms. Meinbach nodded. “Showing Warner the ropes?”
“Absolutely.” Leave. Please leave. He was going to ask me out.
Sure enough, the second she left, he said, “I guess it’s too late for that hayride, but maybe we could get together, um today after school.”
“Y—” The word yes was screaming out of my mouth when I remembered Ralph the mouse, trapped in my purse. I shook my head, “God, I can’t.”
Warner nodded, like he understood. “All righty then. I’ll just crawl back into my cave of shame.”
“No, it’s not like that. I want to go with you. Any other day. It’s just…” I glanced at my purse. “Can you keep a secret?”
“I guess.”
I opened the box, then pointed inside.
Warner drew back, surprised, then leaned forward again. “Is that … a mouse?”
“It was about to be fed to a snake,” I whispered.
“You stole it?”
“It escaped. But I didn’t give it back. I just couldn’t.” I closed the box. “So, anyway, after school, I have to get my mom to take me to PetSmart. If she doesn’t have a heart attack, at least.”
“You could release it somewhere.”
I shook my head. “I don’t like the odds for a white mouse in the wild. No camouflage. Besides, I’m sort of attached to him. I named him Ralph.”
“You know what they say—don’t name the food.” He smiled. “That’s pretty typical of you, though.”
“What is?”
Ms. Meinbach strolled by again, and Warner said, “So it’s typical to have one short story per issue, or more than that?”
I pretended to think. “Sometimes one, sometimes two if they’re short. It depends. Oh, and sometimes we put a personal essay.”
Warner was writing all this down, like a good student. When Ms. Meinbach left, he turned the paper toward me. It read:
Let me take you to PetSmart.
I wrote:
You have a car?
He must be sixteen. I wasn’t yet. I wouldn’t be getting a car anyway. Lisette had gotten one for her birthday, a Saab, and Daddy told her to drive me to school and to share it with me once I got my license. What Daddy didn’t know was, Lisette dropped me off at the bus stop every morning, then picked up her friends. I knew she wouldn’t share either.
Yes, he wrote back.
I thought about it for a second, no more. Mother had told me to ask permission to go in someone’s car, but I knew she’d say yes. She was always harping on how I had no social life. She’d probably be happy to see me join a motorcycle gang if it got me out of the house.
So I wrote back, OK.
“The student parking lot is like Animal Planet,” I said to Warner as we walked to his car after school.
Okay, I was trying to be clever. Which is not to say I’d spent the whole rest of the period thinking of something funny (I hoped) to say.
“How so?” he asked. “I mean, not that I think you’re wrong.”
“It’s the whole food chain. At the top are the girls with Audis or boys whose parents buy them a big SUV and don’t care how many people they pack into it.”
He smirked. “The no-rules kids. My favorites.”
It occurred to me that, for all I knew, he could be walking me up to a new SUV, but he said, “And their friends are like the rest of their pride, right?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Then, the next step down are kids with their parents’ old cars or something. They’re like tortoises and skunks, not predators, but at least they have defenses.”
“Right,” he agreed. “Crawl into their shell.”
I nodded. “Then, there are pedestrians, which are the equivalent of bugs. Their only hope is that maybe no one will notice them.”
He actually laughed. “And what are you?”
“I take the bus. We’re not even part of the animal planet. We’re like cattle, bound for the feed lot, heads down, texting each other, trying to pretend it isn’t happening as we trudge to our doom.” I saw Lisette getting into her—our—white Saab with five friends, one more than the car could hold.
“Lioness at four o’clock,” Warner said.
He meant Lisette. “You got that right.” I should have told him that she was my stepsister, but then I’d have to introduce them. I did not want to introduce Warner to Lisette. Like, obviously, I’d have to if we got married, but not before then.
I called Mother. Her joy at hearing that I was going out with a boy was so loud I had to pretend to drop the call to keep Warner from hearing. I turned my ringer off. That done, I took shotgun in Warner’s not-new-enough-to-be-spoiled-but-not-so-old-it-looks-gangsta Honda Civic.
“Nice car.” I tried to check my hair in the side view without being obvious. It actually looked pretty good.
“Spoils of parental guilt. My parents got it for me to make up for moving again.” He smiled. “Though, maybe I don’t actually mind being back here. Now.”
I smiled. “Do you mind if I take out Runaway Ralph? I promise he won’t eat your dashboard.”
“Go ahead.”
I opened the box and petted the mouse’s head. He stared up at me with wide, frightened eyes. I’d thought all white mice had red eyes, but his were black. “It’s okay, little guy. Really, you’re a lot better off in my purse. It may not seem that way, but sometimes, things work out for the best.”
“Like me, moving back here.” Warner handed me a package of Cheez-Its that were sitting in his cup holder. “See if he wants these.”
I took out a cracker. The mouse hesitated, stuck his head into the corner of the box, then turned around and took a few tentative nibbles.
“He’d be dead by now,” I said. “Fischer lets students watch him feed the snake right after school.”
“Yikes. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
“Yes.” I took the mouse and the cracker out and cupped them both in my hands.
“So, now you can tell me why my mouse-napping was typical. Do you think I’m generally involved in animal trafficking?”
My voice sounded different to me. I actually did sound confident.
Warner laughed. I noticed that when he laughed,
he showed both rows of teeth, and they were very straight. I remembered he used to have braces. “You just seem like a really compassionate person.”
“Because of the mouse?”
“No. I remember in seventh grade, that kid, Nate, in our civics class.”
I nodded. Nate had actually been in my class most years since kindergarten. He had some learning problems, and sometimes he got overwhelmed and cried. Most teachers tried to help him, but our civics teacher, Ms. Hill, seemed to try to fluster him, asking questions in a baby voice you’d use for a stupid person or loudly pointing out when he wasn’t going fast enough. “Ms. Hill was so mean.”
Warner nodded. “I always wanted to do something. It was like one of those nature shows, where the cheetahs are attacking the baby gazelle, and all you can do is watch.”
“I hate that.”
“But you actually stood up to her.”
“Got in big trouble too.” I looked out the window, remembering. One day, Nate wasn’t copying an assignment off the board. It was a long assignment, guidelines for a project, and Hill was screaming at him for not doing it. People—the usual suspects—were snickering. Finally, I copied it myself and just handed it to him.
“Hill saw me copy the assignment, of course,” I said to Warner. “She turned on me, saying, ‘He’s never going to learn if people do things for him.’”
“You remember what you said to her?” Warner asked.
“Remember? I had to repeat it to the assistant principal. I said, ‘Yeah, obviously he learns a lot better when people like you scream at him.’”
“I don’t think you said ‘people,’ though. I almost applauded.”
I looked down, embarrassed. “I’m not usually like that, all assertive, I mean. That’s practically the only assertive thing I’ve ever done.”
“And freeing a mouse, and breaking out of hoedown jail.”
I laughed, flattered he remembered me as some kind of Rebel Girl, even though I wasn’t. Usually, I figured no one noticed me at all. “She just made me so mad. I had to say something.”
“I know. That’s what made it awesome. You were like this perfect student, and there you were, talking back to the teacher. I thought, ‘I want to know that girl.’”