Читать книгу Perfect - Natasha Friend - Страница 8

4

MR. MINX’S CLASS, THURSDAY. Ashley Barnum didn’t speak to me.

It’s not that I expected she’d sit with me or anything. It’s not like I thought we’d be best buds now, just because we talked for two minutes. Still, did she or did she not say “See you in Minx’s class third period”?

Minx’s class, Friday. Not a peep.

Maybe the word see meant just that. She would see me, but not necessarily speak to me. In which case, fine, she was off the hook.

Minx’s class, Monday. Nothing.

Quite possibly, Ashley Barnum was ignoring me on purpose. And could I blame her? Get caught talking to a loser like me, and the popularity rug could be yanked out from under you like that. Poof!

Minx’s class is bad enough as it is. It is the kind of class where you scrunch down in your seat the whole time, praying you don’t get called on. What Mr. Minx loves is books. What he loves even more is the sound of his own voice. Sometimes, when he’s reading out loud, he gets so impressed with himself you can actually see tears in his eyes. On Tuesday, he was as gaga as ever.

“Vocabulary dictation,” said Minx, holding a stump of yellow chalk to his mouth and tapping his upper lip with it. “Adjectives. . . . Alienated. Disenchanted. Disillusioned.”

Another thing about Minx, he loves using big words. Those three he said, I had no idea what they meant. Minx knew it too. “I’m getting some blank looks, people. If you don’t know a word, get out your dictionary. This is Advanced English. Advanced. You are expected to take some initiative here.”

Minx squinted across the room, holding the chalk stump in the air like a dart. “Alienated . . . Disenchanted . . . Disillusioned . . .”

He gave us about ten seconds with our dictionaries before he fired a question at us. “When . . . under what circumstances . . . might one feel alienated? Hmm?”

Minx paced the aisles in his Wal-Mart sneakers, the Velcro kind. He stopped at the end of my row and pivoted, tapping Georgine’s desk with his chalk. “I’m not asking this question for my health, people.” Taptaptaptap. “I’m actually looking for an intelligent response. Ms. Miner, do you have an intelligent response?”

Georgie sank a little lower in her seat. She shook her head no.

Minx gave her desk one final tap and moved on to the next row. As soon as he was out of earshot Georgie leaned over and poked me with her pen. “Alienated, like alien?” she whispered.

I shrugged back.

Georgie is what you would call a worrier. She worries like crazy when she doesn’t know the right answer for something. You can tell she’s stressing by these two little lines between her eyes. Every so often she gets one of her “tension headaches,” as her mother calls them, and has to stay home from school for two days without any visitors. Georgie’s mother is very bugsome, to tell you the truth. If I had to live with her I’d get tension headaches too.

In Minx’s class you have to watch him every second. You never know when he’s going to pounce. It’s best to take certain precautions. Like for instance, you wouldn’t want to be reading a comic book.

“Mr. Fosse,” Minx said, leaning over Dan Fosse’s desk and snatching Spider-Man right out of his hands. “If you would be so kind as to beam the great light of your knowledge upon us.”

Dan Fosse looked up at Minx. “Huh?”

“Huh?” said Minx. “Earth to Mr. Fosse. Come in, Mr. Fosse. We are discussing adjectives, which, as you may recall, are those pesky parts of speech that describe things. Words like Inattentive. Oblivious. Negligent.”

“Sorry,” Dan muttered.

“As am I,” said Minx, not sounding one bit sorry.

Minx may think he’s the coolest thing on the planet, but here’s something most people don’t know. I saw him outside of school once, on a Saturday night. April and I were walking into Movie Mayhem and he was walking out, wearing the exact same getup he wears to school: white shirt with yellow armpit stains and tan corduroys. He even had one of those fluorescent bands strapped to his calf, to keep his pant cuff out of his bike chain. I reached across the metal divider and waved my hand in front of his face. “Hi, Mr. Minx. It’s me, Isabelle Lee.” Minx blinked at me a few times, like a mole. “Oh. Hello there, Ms. Lee,” he said, and he hightailed it out of there, but not before I saw the movie he’d picked out: The Parent Trap.

The Parent Trap!

Minx scuttled over to Ashley’s desk, opened his palms to Heaven. “Ms. Barnum. Please.”

Ashley tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and clicked her ballpoint pen a few times. “I think,” she said slowly, “that I would feel alienated if . . . if I traveled to another country. Like Zimbabwe, for instance? And I didn’t know the language, or the customs. And I didn’t have the right clothes. . . . That would also be, um, a disenchanting experience.”

A disenchanting experience? Come on. Sometimes Ashley Barnum sounds like she is trying out for the part of the thesaurus in the school play.

Minx bobbed his head up and down like a puppet. “Yes. Yesss. Excellent, Ms. Barnum. Excellent.”

Ashley smiled and clicked her pen a few more times. She is so used to being right.

Brian King was practically falling out of his chair, he was so in love with her right then. He was probably composing another love note in his head that very second. Dear Ashley, My love for you is not alienating, or a disenchanting experience. Oh, no, my darling. It is like . . . it is like . . .

Minx walked back over to Dan Fosse’s seat, picked up Dan’s dictionary, and whacked it against the edge of the desk. Wham! “You see, people?” Wham! Wham! “It helps to actually look the words up. The dictionary is your friend.”

Apparently Mr. Minx is in the habit of whacking his friends against his desk.

On and on he went. “There are still a few spots open in Standard English. I believe there are also a few in Basic English. Any takers?”

This, coming from a grown man who rents The Parent Trap. I wanted to climb up on my desk and announce to the world that our English teacher—the one who thinks he’s the Albert Einstein of books—rents eight-year-old girl movies in his spare time.

The problem is I have no guts. I had to wait until I was outside the classroom to open my mouth. “Minx is a total jerk.”

It was then that Ashley Barnum, with one hand on the water fountain and the other holding back a bunch of blonde hair, turned to stare at me. She licked a bead of water from her upper lip and said, in this very deep voice, “I believe there are a few spots open in Standard English, Ms. Lee.”

I wagged my finger at her. “And several in Basic English, Ms. Barnum.”

Ashley tossed her hair over one shoulder. She crossed her eyes and smiled at the same time.

As I was walking down the hall toward my locker, it occurred to me that Ashley Barnum and I had just shared A Moment.

At lunch, I sat with Nola and Georgine as usual. This new girl, Paula Harbinger from Cleveland, sat with us. Given the choice Paula would probably rather sit at a different table. With the cheerleaders, for instance. Or with the soccer team girls. But you can’t just sit anywhere you want in the cafeteria. You have to get asked to sit at certain tables.

“Is that all you’re eating?” Paula asked when I pulled out my lunch. Two hard-boiled eggs and some carrot sticks.

I shrugged. “I don’t really like lunch.”

Nola and Georgie laugh-smiled at each other.

“Isabelle is a weird eater,” Nola said. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Yeah,” said Georgie. “She hardly eats a thing.”

“I noticed,” Paula said, in a kind of snotty way, which made me want to chuck an egg at her.

“But we love her anyway,” Nola added, which made me want to hug her.

Paula and Georgie were both eating the school lunch—some kind of chicken and rice with gravy, and green beans. For dessert it was cut-up peaches from a can, floating in syrup.

Nola was eating the same exact lunch she eats every day: two peanut butter sandwiches on pumpernickel bread and two chocolate milks. Nola could eat peanut butter and chocolate all day long and not gain an ounce. She has the skinniest, palest little body you ever saw. Whenever she gets cold—which is a lot—her skin turns blue and marbley all over.

My stomach rumbled as I looked at everyone’s food. I could have eaten all three of their lunches and still have been hungry, but the truth is I can’t stand eating in the cafeteria with everyone watching me. If people are going to look at me, I’d rather eat too little than too much.

I took a bite of carrot stick and sprinkled salt on my hard-boiled eggs. I thought about everything I would eat later, when no one was around.

Georgie started talking about soap operas, as usual. She is borderline obsessed with soap operas. I mean, she will not miss two of them, which she secretly tapes during the day so she can watch them at night when her crazy mother is asleep. Nola and I are casual watchers, meaning we know all the characters, but we will not go into cardiac arrest if we miss an episode.

Paula wasn’t even pretending to follow our conversation. Her eyes kept wandering over to the center table. Ashley’s table. You could tell Paula wished she was sitting there more than anything.

Lotsa luck, toots. Basically if you’re not on the field hockey team, and you don’t have long shiny hair and a toothpaste smile and perfectly broken-in size zero jeans, you can forget it.

At the center table Ashley Barnum was busy smiling and tossing her hair while talking to Heather Jellerette. Eli Bronstein, the cutest guy in our grade, came up behind her, pretending to dump ginger ale on her head. Ashley squealed so loud, everyone in the room turned around. “No, Eli! Don’t!” Finally Eli picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder, sack o’ potatoes style, while she whacked him on the butt with a lunch tray. Everyone at the table started clapping and cheering. Eli lowered Ashley into a chair. She sat up smiling, with pink cheeks and flyaway hair. “Eli!”

“God,” said Paula. “Could they be any louder?” She was trying to act annoyed, but you could tell she was thinking, Okay, here’s the plan: I’m going to grow out my bangs and buy some cooler jeans, and then maybe . . .

Nola just smiled and took a sip of chocolate milk. “They are kinda loud. You’ll get used to it though.”

Nola doesn’t care about things like who’s sitting at which table. Neither does Georgie.

I guess that’s the difference between us.