Space Station Seventh Grade

  I knew exactly what she was doing. Marceline had been writing a song. “Trombone Troubadour.” All summer long she was stuck on the refrain, couldn’t get it right.

  She stopped and called: “No, that’s no good. Forget that. Don’t remember it. Now wait—” She tried some new toots. “There—that’s better. Start remembering—” she lifted the horn to her lips, took a deep breath—“now!”

  A bus went by. For three or four seconds you couldn’t hear the trombone because of all the hooting and howling. The bus driver even gave a toot on his horn.

  She stopped (“No—that’s wrong too. Forget it.”) and started (“Okay, try this. Start remembering—now!”) again.

  “That’s it!” I yelled. “We’re through! Finished! You don’t really wanna do all that crazy stuff! You’re just daring people to laugh at you! You’re a sadomasochist! You lie awake at night thinking up ways to make me look like an idiot! If you think I’m remembering those notes for you—or even listening to that slop—you’re crazy!”

  She pushed the mouthpiece away and just stared at me. Then I felt something against the back of my legs, and another horn, like a trombone from hell, blasted my heart right out of my chest and sent it end-over-end like a fifty-yard field goal. I turned around. Vesto’s car was behind me—right behind me—on the sidewalk, the bumper touching the back of my jeans.

  Door twang. “This time,” Richie grinned, “y’either come with us or you’re grass.”

  I got in. I would have even without the threat. The guys cheered. Richie kept pounding me on the back. We jolted back down to street level, Vesto gunned the engine, and the tires peeled a long, high note—the only note I was going to remember.

  So I rode to school in style. Naturally, we got mobbed when we pulled up. Vesto could have run for king. He must have driven ten different groups around the block. People were lining up at the curb like it was the loopy roller coaster at Hershey Park.

  The bell rang. Everybody groaned and herded inside.

  When I reached the second-floor landing, a bunch of kids were at the window, laughing and pointing.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “What a weirdo.”

  “She’s even weirder than last year.”

  “Marceline McBeanpole.”

  From my place halfway up the last flight of steps, I looked over their heads and saw her across the street: the only one outside, trombone case on the sidewalk, still trying to get it right. A girl’s voice sneered, “It’s just for attention, the stuff she does. She thinks she’s impressing the teachers.”

  No, I thought, that’s not true. She’s not trying to impress anybody. This is just the way she is, that’s all. She’s just being herself, I thought. But I didn’t say anything.

  I crept up the stairs. I hoped nobody would notice me. Too late—

  “Yo, Herkimer! Lookit your lover girl out there!”

  I bopped to the top and through the door, pretending not to hear.

  The hallway was all bodies. Moving. Surging. Mooing. I brushed against them, bumped off them, slid through them. Voices called my name, first-day voices I hadn’t eard since June. I kept moving. The deeper I plunged into the herd, the lonesomer I felt.

  A tap on my shoulder.

  “Excuse me.”

  I turned. It was a little kid. Looking up at me. Seventh-grader.

  “I think I’m lost. Can you tell me where Home-room One-Seventeen is?”

  I just eyeballed him for a minute. He was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen. He was wearing inch-thick glasses, his hair was sticking out in ninety different directions, and one of the points of his shirt collar was aiming practically straight up in the air. Then I saw the belt. It was made of hundreds—maybe thousands—of tiny beads. Red, white, and green beads. The green beads made up the shapes of reindeer, antlers and all. The red beads were the reindeer’s noses. A whole herd of Rudolphs.

  Second bell rang.

  “Downstairs,” I said, and took off down the nearest steps. I could hear the runt clomping after me. The kids on the first floor had almost all drained into their rooms. I tore up the hall, almost bowling over a homeroom teacher. I prayed I wasn’t too late. I slammed through the end doors, down the steps, slammed the heavy main door open…

  There she was, coming up the walk, kind of bouncy, trombone case swinging. And a proud little grin on her face that said, I finally got it.

  I held the door open for her. She might have glanced at me, but I couldn’t be sure because of the shades. She kept grinning, holding her head high, the way she does, and as she passed by me I hoped—I knew—we weren’t finished after all.

  Checkin’

  The main thing, the first couple days of school, is checkin’. Like, “Hey man, check that out.” And, “Hey man, check that out!”

  It’s a checkin’-out orgy. Most of the people you haven’t seen all summer, and every one of them—even the nerdiest nerd—is fascinating the first time around. Most of them have changed at least a little bit. Some haven’t changed at all, like they spent the summer sitting in homeroom. And then, sometimes, there’s somebody who changed so much you’ll never recognize her till somebody tells you who she is.

  Girls wouldn’t understand this, but boys are born with a kind of measuring device, located somewhere behind the eyes, I guess. It kicks in around ninth grade. It’s kind of like an artillery range-finder. Whenever a girl comes toward you, it zeroes in instantly on the gazoobies and practically gives you a hard-copy printout on things like size, shape, floppability. But mostly size.

  It’s incredible, the accuracy. If a girl’s balloons gain a millimeter overnight, your range-finder will pick it up. Let a whole summer go by, your fuses start blowing. Everywhere you look—where there was nothing in June, now there’s something, and where there was something, now there’s more.

  So. First morning. Richie and I are heading down the hall, when my range-finder picks up something. Still four or five classrooms away, bobbing into view for just an instant at a time, then disappearing into the crowd. But one thing I know already: we’re talking size, we’re talking great white sharks.

  Richie nudges me. He’s tracking them too.

  Then they come into full view. Under a pink shirt. Bouncy. Very.

  A rattling kind of croak comes up from Richie’s throat, and he nudges me so hard I fly against some lockers and drop my books. By the time I get everything back together, she’s past.

  Our eyes speak to each other: “Who was that?”

  We search our range-finder memory banks. We come up empty.

  “Maybe she’s new,” I say.

  “A transfer,” Richie says.

  “Maybe from a Catholic school.”

  “Or France.”

  We spotted her twice again that day. Still no ID.

  “Know what?” said Rich.

  “What?”

  “Maybe she’s not a transfer. Maybe she’s just one of them quiet people. It’s a big school, y’know.”

  “Rich,” I said, “stop and think. You saw ’em. I saw ’em. Our own two eyes. That girl would have to have classes in the mop closet for us never to notice her before.”

  He couldn’t argue with that. A minute later I figured I had the answer. “Maybe it’s the clothes. Maybe she always wore loose-fitting clothes before. Baggy, y’know?”

  Richie sneered. “I don’t care if she was wearing a tablecloth. Them things send out shock waves when they move.”

  He was right. The range-finder is like an infrared camera—it can detect through camouflage and stuff. If there’s a boob anywhere in a room, the range-finder will lock in on it within five seconds. If the Russians ever sent a lady spy over here disguised as a man, she’d never get past the first ninth-grade guy.

  It was still a mystery when we met at The Stairwell next day. The Stairwell is an ancient tradition at Avon Oaks J.H. If you’re a guy and you’re in the ninth grade, it’s the place to be in the morning between first and second bells
(unless there’s a fight to watch). It didn’t take long to find out that other guys were wondering about the mystery girl too.

  One of them was Vesto. Except he wasn’t wondering, he was flat-out saying: “I don’t care who it is, I’m getting me a handfulla them babies.”

  We called Dugan in on the case. That meant getting him to hooky from Holy Ghost, the Catholic high school, which starts at ninth grade. We told him we needed him to see if she was a Catholic-school transfer, and we promised him that even if she wasn’t, the hooky would be worth it just to get a gawk at her.

  When Dugan showed up that morning, he had his usual tie on, the one he’d been wearing since seventh grade. It used to be red; now it’s black. We told him to take it off, it could get him caught, but he wouldn’t. Walking down the hallway, we kept Dugan between us. We nudged him as soon as we spotted her, then we all kept quiet till she passed.

  We turned to Dugan. He looked glassy-eyed, almost faint.

  “Well?” I said. “Is she a transfer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, what?”

  He stopped, turned, looked after her as the mob swallowed her up. “Over at Holy Ghost they say they’re bigger over here. I thought those were just rumors.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “We heard they were bigger over there.”

  Dugan spent the rest of the day at A.O., mostly cruising the hallways. He also went to lunch, two study halls, and a Health class.

  After Dugan’s fizzle, we figured maybe we were letting our emotions get in the way. What we needed was a cool, calm, scientific opinion. Calvin’s. Calvin is going to be a doctor, and if there’s one thing he knows, it’s the human body.

  When we told him about the problem, he just folded his arms and smirked. You could almost see the white coat slip over him. “You don’t know who it is, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Okay—I’m going to ask you a question. One question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you look at her face?”

  I looked at Rich. “Huh?”

  “Her face. Face.”

  “Yeah, we looked,” said Rich.

  “How long?”

  “Enough to see we don’t know her.”

  Calvin just stared at us for a minute, grinning. Then he said, “Lead on.”

  Well, ol’ Doc Calvin stayed cool, but he couldn’t come up with a name. All he could say was, “Something’s wrong here.”

  Then there was a voice behind us: “Jewel Fiorito.”

  We all stood there with our mouths open as Marceline went strolling by. “It’s Jewel Fiorito,” she sniffed, and turned into her next class.

  Belief

  It was Jewel Fiorito.

  At first we didn’t believe it. But then we checked out her face real good, and behind the new glasses and new hairdo and new makeup, we started to see traces of the old Jewel.

  Others were seeing it too. Next morning at The Stairwell, that’s all you heard: “It’s Jewel Fiorito!… It’s Jewel Fiorito!”

  Calvin didn’t believe it.

  “Nobody changes that much,” he said.

  “Calvin,” I said, “a whole summer. A lot can happen.”

  “Two-and-a-half months. Seventy-five days. They’d have to grow about a quarter of an inch a day.”

  “So?” I said. “Don’t girls develop faster?”

  “That’s not development, that’s explosion. She’s human, not popcorn.”

  Later I was talking to Rich. “Calvin doesn’t believe it’s Jewel.”

  “I can’t either. It is hard to believe.”

  “No,” I said, “I mean, he really doesn’t believe it.”

  “Well, tellya, my mother believes it.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “She saw her at the mall last week.”

  “Recognized her?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Right off the bat.”

  “Man. Girls, huh? They can’t fool each other.”

  “I guess. She was like that too.”

  “Your mom?’”

  “Yeah. She said she really ballooned out between eighth and ninth grade.”

  “That’s how she said it? Ballooned?”

  “Yeah, ballooned.”

  “I don’t believe that mother of yours, man.”

  “Anyway,” Rich went on, “she says it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, having them that big.”

  “No? How’s that?”

  “They droop.”

  “Droop?”

  “Yeah. The bigger they are, the more they droop. And the older you get, the more they droop.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “Sure. What’s good about drooping?”

  I was heading for study hall after seventh period that day when somebody snatched my shoulder and almost ripped it off. Richie was tearing up the hall with Looie Lopezia and a bunch of other guys. “C’mon!” he yelled back.

  I took off. I caught them by the cafeteria turn. Seventh-graders scattered as we stampeded down the hall. I wondered where we were going. We made a quick turn through the door at the foot of a stairway, and suddenly everybody stopped. I was just going to ask what we were doing, when I looked up and saw Jewel make the turn and come ba-ba-bouncing down the lower flight of stairs.

  It was incredible. Like they were on rubber bands. I could have sworn she was going to smack herself in the face. She gave a little wave as she went by. The guys all grinned.

  “Hi, Jewel.”

  “Hi, Jewel.”

  “Hi, Jewel.”

  I had seen a miracle.

  Next morning, in The Stairwell, Vesto was on the radiator. Standing. Piercing the air with a two-fingered whistle. A chill went through me. I knew what was coming. I wanted to pull him down, but it was too late, way too late. There was dead silence, every face gaping up as he told—and showed—how he finally got “them babies” when he gave Jewel a ride in his car the night before.

  I didn’t wait for him to finish. I headed for homeroom by myself. Something was messed up. Ruined.

  Kickoff

  They installed lights at the main football field last year, so now the high school has night games. You can see the lights from all over. Everybody goes. Like moths. Except Calvin. He doesn’t like sports.

  We went. Me, Richie, Dugan, Peter. We all agreed to sneak in, except Peter. He wanted to pay. He’s stubborn like that. So while Peter went to a gate, the rest of us scouted around for the best place to climb the fence. We found it at the end of the field opposite the scoreboard, beyond the goalpost. The nearest gate was over by the visitors’ stands. A lot of people were lined up. On the track, between us and the goalpost, about twenty feet away, a man was standing with his hands behind his back, facing the field. He wore a blue suit and cap.

  I pointed. “Look. Think it’s a guard?”

  I never got an answer. Dugan and Richie were already mashing themselves to the fence—which was about twice our height—digging their toes into the chain link spaces, climbing up, one careful foot on the top barbs, pushing off—and back down to earth, inside.

  “Come on!” Richie waved, and they took off.

  The guard turned around. I backed away, made it look like I was heading along the fence to the gate. I kept sneaking peeks. He kept facing the fence.

  Then “The Star-Spangled Banner” started. The guard turned his back to me, stood at attention, and saluted.

  My chance!

  I reached up, got a good hold, dug my toes in, and started climbing.

  Whose broad stripes and bright stars,…

  I felt kind of guilty. It was the first time I could remember ever moving during the National Anthem.

  O’er the ram-parts we watched,…

  My foot kept slipping. The fence wire was eating my fingers to the bone. I had to get over and down before the song ended.

  And the rock-ets’ red glare,…

  I got one sneak on top, actually d
ug it into a barb to help haul the rest of me up. I was there, teetering. It was high.

  … the bombs burst-ing…

  A lot higher than I had thought.

  … in air,…

  Don’t panic. This is the critical moment. One false move

  Gave proof…

  and you’re cole slaw.

  … through the night…

  I let one leg dangle as far down as possible, steadied myself,

  … that our flag…

  and pushed off.

  … was still there:…

  Ripping sound. I jerked to a stop. But I wasn’t down—

  O say,…

  I was up. The ground still way below my feet. Pressure under my arms. My jacket tight, tugging upward. It was caught on the fence top.

  … does tha-at star-span-gled…

  I’m hanging from the fence!

  … ban-ne-er ye-et wa-ave…

  I tried to reach back. Couldn’t. It was like a full nelson. Why didn’t they ever play more than one verse of the National Anthem?

  … and the home of the brave?

  Suddenly everything started moving again, like a stuck movie restarting. A couple thousand people—none of them noticing me yet—just going about their business. Even the guard wasn’t turning around. In fact, he was walking away. Great!

  “Hi, Jason.”

  Somebody behind me, outside the fence. I cranked my head around—it would only go a couple inches because of the full nelson the fence had on me—and strained my eyeballs downward. It was the seventh-grader with the Rudolph belt. I wondered how he knew my name.

  “What’re you doing up there?”

  “Beat it!” I hissed. “I’m part of the band show. Beat it! You’ll spoil it!”

  He left. Then I got noticed by somebody in front of me. A little kid. Real little. He wandered over and stopped right below me. The top of his head didn’t come up to my dangling feet. He was munching on a soft pretzel as big as his face. He had a yellow mustache from the mustard. Where was his father? Damn parents, they don’t watch their kids.