The Friendship Song (4 page)

“I'm sure!” I called back, and I managed to almost sound happy because I had Rawnie with me.

We headed toward school. She didn't just walk, she did little dance steps the whole way. I'd already noticed she hardly ever stood still. Her feet were always moving, feeling out a tempo, like there was music in the air I couldn't hear. She had on a short skirt and a neon pink jacket and dangle earrings that swung when she moved. She looked terrific. I had on a baggy sweater and my best jeans, but I felt like a horse next to her.

I was glad she was with me though, because as soon as we got on the main street there were big kids standing on the corners watching us go past. Guys, mostly. Out-of-school guys with tattoos and wrecked clothes and a lot of attitude. I didn't look at them as we walked past, so I don't know for sure who yelled or if it was at Rawnie or me or what, but somebody yelled, “Hey, jailbait!” and “Hey, look at those hooters!” And then there was all sorts of whistling and calling, and they were laughing about something. After we got past them Rawnie looked at me like she was checking on me.

I said, “
Now
I'm scared.” I was too, nearly as scared as I was out in Gus's backyard in the dark with the weird music going. I didn't know what the weird music was likely to do to me, but people tell all sorts of stories about what happens to girls in the city who walk in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rawnie looked a little surprised and said, “You don't have to worry about them. All they're gonna do is yell dumb stuff.”

“Is that all?” I meant it like, wasn't that bad enough?

“Yeah! School is worse than they are.”

Oh, great. Just wonderful. Maybe she was trying to scare me. I should have known by then that Rawnie played straight with me, but I still hoped she was trying to scare me, because that would mean school wasn't as bad as she said.

It was, though. The thing was, if a guy on the street bothered you, you could go away. Or if he got too close to you, you could smack him hard or even kick him where it hurt to make him stop. But in school, you had to stay trapped in the same building as drug-heads or whoever. And if you hit somebody in school for something, you were the one who would get in trouble. I found that out before I even got to homeroom.

The middle school stuck up like another skinny brick house except six times as big. It looked too big to me, because where I went before, I was in an elementary-school sixth grade with one teacher, but now I was going to have to use a locker and go to different classes and everything.

There were groups of kids standing all around, and Rawnie steered me between them. Some she said hi to, and others she stayed away from. The “heads,” the ones who looked a lot like the guys on the street corners, she stayed away from because they were the kind who would come up behind you in gym class and pull your shorts down. And she stayed away from the “preps” because they were stuck up. She waved at some guys who looked like real nerds and a skinny guy on a skateboard, but mostly we just talked to girls. They said hi to me when she introduced us, but even when I was talking with them I felt other kids staring at me. I wanted to just shrink, like a Shrinky Dink. I felt too big. Everything about me was too big.

Kids stared even more when I headed toward the door. Like they'd never seen a new person go into the school early before. But I had to do it whether they stared or not, because I had to get assigned to a homeroom. Rawnie went with me to show me where the office was.

I didn't get far, though, because practically first thing when I walked up the steps, before I got to the door even, some zit-faced boy ran up to me and said, “Whatcha got, baby?” and grabbed at the front of my sweater.

“Hey!” I whacked him a good one, right across his pimples, to knock him away. There were some other boys watching and laughing, so I guess he did it on a dare. But that didn't help me any. They all ran, and a woman teacher with three chins had hold of me with one hand and Pimples with the other, and Pimples was whining, “I just said hi to her and she hit me!”

And of course I couldn't tell what it was really about. I mean, I'd rather have detention for a month than say he pinched my breast.

So there I was in the office all right, but not the way I'd expected. Poor dear Pimples had to go to the nurse and get an ice pack because my hand had put a red mark on his face, which I bet did not hurt nearly as much as part of me did, and I was supposed to see the disciplinarian, and I kept telling myself, I am not going to cry. Not. Going. To. Cry. Anything else could happen just as long as I didn't bawl. I wondered if they still paddled kids here.

They did. The disciplinarian, who was a big man named Mr. Kuchwald, told me that right away. Not on a first offense, but two more strikes and I was out. It was his job to scare me, and he made sure he did it. He showed me the paddle, which was big. He told me nobody was allowed to hit anybody in his school except him, and he said he hoped I was just off to a bad start and he hoped I was not going to make it a habit to come see him, and then he said, “Do you have anything to say, young lady?”

I just stood there. So far the not-crying was going okay, but if I tried to say anything, it might mess me up. Anyway, I just wanted out.

“If you have anything on your mind, you say it to my face right now.”

Just then there was a tap on the door, and it opened, and Rawnie came in. I could tell right away from looking at her that she didn't like being in Mr. Kuchwald's office any better than I did.

“Go out and wait your turn!” he snapped at her.

She stepped forward instead and said in a shaky voice, “I'm here about Harper. I saw what happened, and it wasn't her fault. He started it.”

I think it took Mr. Kuchwald a minute to remember that I was Harper and to figure out that Rawnie had actually come in on her own to try to help me out, and I can't blame him, because I couldn't believe it myself. But while he was trying to figure it out he glared at her, and she looked about as sick as I felt. Finally he yelled at her, “You know the rules! I don't care who started it, nobody hits anybody!”

Rawnie said, “Mr. Kuchwald, he did something to her.” Her voice was real soft.

“He did something? What?” But the look I was shooting her told her, Don't say it, and I think she was kind of choking on the words anyway. She stood there, and Mr. Kuchwald leaned toward her and barked, “You can't just come in here and make vague accusations!”

I had to get us out of there, so I said, “I don't want to get in fights. I won't hit anybody again, Mr. Kuchwald.”

“Now, that's what I like to hear.” He mellowed right away. “Tell you what. I don't like to give anybody detention on their very first day. You stay out of trouble from here on”—he had to look again at the paper where he had written my name—“Harper, and we'll both pretend this never happened.”

Once we were both out in the hall again I stopped Rawnie with my hand and said, “Thanks.”

“Sure.” She sounded bitter.

“No, I mean it. Thanks for trying to help.” I couldn't understand why she did it. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me before.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “You don't have to thank me for anything. Ever.”

I just looked back at her, trying to figure her out. But at least I didn't feel like crying anymore.

She said, “M, S, J,” which means Majorly Stupid Jerks, and the way she rolled her eyes made me grin. And then I remembered I still didn't have a homeroom. So I had to go back into the office, and Rawnie waited for me, and then the bell rang, so we were both late. But we were smiling.

We had the same homeroom, so Rawnie could help me with my lock and locker a little bit before first period. But we didn't have the same schedule after that, so I was on my own. I was late to just about every class. Once I asked a big kid where I was supposed to be and got sent clear to the wrong end of the school. After that I just asked teachers.

I saw Rawnie at lunch, and she saved me a seat the way she'd promised, and her friends who sat with us were nice. The food was like barf, though. How could anybody, even a school cafeteria, make hamburgers into barfburgers? Maybe I was just so stressed out that nothing would have tasted good to me.

Maybe not. “Wait'll you get to eat the green hot dogs,” one of Rawnie's friends told me.

“They're more gray than green,” Rawnie said.

“So they're gray-green. You know what they're made out of? Processed worm guts.”

Gee, thanks. Now I had that to look forward to.

I saw Pimples, whose name turned out to be Brent, in some of my classes. Brent looked like a head. I found out he was a bikehead, just roared around on his dirt bike all day every day he wasn't in school. And I found out bikeheads were supposed to be even more obnoxious than skateheads. Brent kept smirking at me, and if I had to look at him, I glared at him. When the final bell rang you better believe I was ready to go home. Altogether it had not been a real good day.

Rawnie and I walked back past hooting and stuff from the guys hanging out again, and this time I hardly even noticed.

“It was good you hit Brent even though you got in trouble,” Rawnie said.

“You think so?” I figured one of two things would happen: Either the buttheads who went to that school would respect me a little and let me alone, or they would keep trying the same thing to see if they could get me in trouble again. I wasn't looking forward to finding out which way things went.

Rawnie said, “Yeah. I think you gotta stand up for yourself. People in general, I mean, gotta stand up for themselves. And, you know, other people too.”

I was too bummed to really hear what she was saying.

When we got close to home we cut through an alley, and Rawnie dawdled a little, bouncing through some dance moves and reading the graffiti. There was something spray-painted on every garage door, every shed, and every concrete-block wall. Some of it was serious, like
SAVE THE OCEANS
and
LOVE AND ACID AND SMACK
,
NO WAY BACK
. Some of it was funny, like
MR
.
K WEARS SATIN PANTIES
. And most of it was just plain gross. Some of it was so gross I didn't even know what it meant, but I didn't want to say so.

“See what I mean?” Rawnie said when we got to our street.

“See what you mean about what?”

“About your—uh, about Spook House McCogg. How come nobody ever spray-paints anything around her place?”

“I dunno.” We were home. Well, it didn't feel like home, but we were there, in front of the house. “Well, uh, bye.” I wanted to say thanks to Rawnie, but she'd told me not to. “See you tomorrow. Unless I just happen to get sick.”

She giggled and said, “You thinking about being sick?”

“I'd love to, but I don't think my dad would fall for it.” He hardly ever let me miss school.

“He's nice, but he's not stupid, huh?”

“Right. Well, see ya.”

“See ya.”

When I got inside, Gus was sitting at the kitchen table like she might have been waiting for me. “How was school?” she asked.

“
Won
derful,” I told her, real sarcastic, and I dumped my books on the table hard. I had lugged home every book because I had to cover them all, and I had assignments in most of them, and altogether I didn't need her of all people asking me how school was right then.

She just looked at me, and then she said, “Well, good,” and she got up and went outside.

I watched dumb cartoons for a couple of hours, and then Gus came in and started fixing supper and called me to help her. I sighed and rolled my eyes before I went into the kitchen. Gus asked me to set the table and said, “So how was school, really?”

I just shrugged. Even if she was my real mother or my father I still wouldn't have told her much. What happens at school is for kids to know and adults to wish they could find out. But she stood and stared at me until I had to say something, so I muttered, “Great.”

“That bad? What happened?”

“Nothing. I was late to everything and I've got a ton of homework and sixteen books to cover, that's all.”

“I can cover the books for you,” she said.

I didn't want her doing anything for me, but I didn't want to do it myself either. I didn't know what to say, so I mumbled, “What's for supper?”

“Hamburgs.”

“Aw, crud, I had hamburgs for lunch.”

Gus's burgers were a lot better than the school's, though. And right after supper Gus went and scrounged around in one of the spare bedrooms and came out with about a dozen rolls of wallpaper.

“This stuff makes great book covers,” she said. “Lasts like iron.”

“Sounds good to me.” That was my dad, doing the dishes and trying to be a ray of sunshine. He had been asking me how school was too, but no way was I going to tell him, or he'd be saying he should have taken me himself.

“Ick,” I said. Gus had bad taste in wallpaper. Like, one of the patterns was nothing but black and white piano keys, and another was paisley. But I picked one that wasn't too bad, sort of tie-dye, and Gus went ahead and covered my books for me. There weren't really sixteen. Then she left to go outside again, and I went up to my room and did my homework. There wasn't really all that much. I was done just about the time it started to get dark out.

Just about the time the weird music started up again.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Instead of feeling scared I felt frustrated. I wasn't going to sit there and let that strange noise freak me out, and I didn't feel like chasing after it either. I'd had enough hassle for one day. Without even having to think, I got up, headed out, and went across the street to Rawnie's place.

Somebody I didn't know answered the door, a girl maybe old enough to drive a car. Slim and pretty. She had to be Rawnie's big sister. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Is Rawnie around?”