backpack to study it again. Who knew about my dad? And how did they know? I wondered. Had they seen him at the Summerland Mall contest, or did somebody recognize him when we signed up at school? It didn’t take a genius to realize that whoever had found out about my dad wouldn’t keep the information a secret for very long. It would only be a matter of time before all four hundred seventh graders at Charles Lister knew who I was.
The words on the note were printed in large, bold-looking letters, as if the person writing them hadn’t felt any fear about announcing what they knew. But it appeared rushed, too. The dot over the
i
in “Lister” was more like a slash, so it was possible the writer had scribbled the note quickly and slapped it on my locker in a hurry.
I squinted at the smiley face. Would a guy sign a note with a purple smiley face? It didn’t seem like something a guy would do, so maybe that meant the note writer was a girl. But if the smiley face was supposed to be a mocking face—which is how the half-curved mouth looked—then maybe it was a guy.
God, this was crazy.
I crumpled the note in my hand and tossed it toward the garbage can across the room. It missed. I got up and nailed it the second time.
That night, I dreamed about the Charles W. Lister cafeteria. Only, in my dream, my dad’s neighbor Gladys was one of the cafeteria ladies and, strangely, a lot of my Boston friends were in line with me. Everything else seemed fairly normal until I came out of the line and began looking for a seat. I was holding my tray, which had turkey and mashed potatoes piled on it, when I realized the room had suddenly gotten quiet and still. I turned around to ask my Boston friend Brian what was going on, and he said, “Look at yourself, freak,” and I looked down and realized for the first time that I was wearing a black leather jumpsuit—and I know this sounds pretty disturbing for a thirteen-year-old, but I had black chest hair. Like yarn.
Yarn chest hair.
In the dream, I kept moving from table to table with my lunch tray and my yarn chest hair, and nobody would let me sit down.
12. City Street Blues
The next note appeared on Friday.
All week, I had been checking my locker after each class. This wasn’t always easy to do, since most of my classes were at the opposite end of Charles Lister. Clutching my books against my chest, I would leap out of my seat the minute the bell rang and zigzag down the hall the way people do when they have about three minutes to catch a plane. If I got to the point where I could spot my locker in the distance and there were no yellow squares stuck on the green metal, I would do a 180 and race to my next class.
But on Friday, I stopped at my locker right before lunch and there it was—another yellow square stuck crookedly at eye level. My armpits started to prickle as I pulled the note off the locker.
A large peace symbol was scrawled on the paper in orange marker, along with the same “Elvisly Yours” signature and a smiley face in the corner. Was the peace symbol some kind of warning? Did it have some sinister meaning at Charles Lister that I didn’t know about yet?
That afternoon, I decided not to take the school bus home. I wanted time to think, that’s what I told myself, but I’ll also admit maybe I was feeling slightly paranoid. When you’ve only been in a new school for a week and people you don’t know are obviously watching you and leaving cryptic notes on your locker, I think anybody would feel a little jumpy.
But once I started the couple-mile walk down State Street, lugging two textbooks the size of boulders in my backpack (courtesy of my homework-obsessed World History and Algebra teachers), I felt like an idiot. It had only been a peace symbol, for cripes sake. It wasn’t exactly a death threat.
Cars zoomed by me and the air smelled like hot tar and exhaust. I tried to think about Florida instead of focusing on how much farther I had to walk on the
The words on the note were printed in large, bold-looking letters, as if the person writing them hadn’t felt any fear about announcing what they knew. But it appeared rushed, too. The dot over the
i
in “Lister” was more like a slash, so it was possible the writer had scribbled the note quickly and slapped it on my locker in a hurry.
I squinted at the smiley face. Would a guy sign a note with a purple smiley face? It didn’t seem like something a guy would do, so maybe that meant the note writer was a girl. But if the smiley face was supposed to be a mocking face—which is how the half-curved mouth looked—then maybe it was a guy.
God, this was crazy.
I crumpled the note in my hand and tossed it toward the garbage can across the room. It missed. I got up and nailed it the second time.
That night, I dreamed about the Charles W. Lister cafeteria. Only, in my dream, my dad’s neighbor Gladys was one of the cafeteria ladies and, strangely, a lot of my Boston friends were in line with me. Everything else seemed fairly normal until I came out of the line and began looking for a seat. I was holding my tray, which had turkey and mashed potatoes piled on it, when I realized the room had suddenly gotten quiet and still. I turned around to ask my Boston friend Brian what was going on, and he said, “Look at yourself, freak,” and I looked down and realized for the first time that I was wearing a black leather jumpsuit—and I know this sounds pretty disturbing for a thirteen-year-old, but I had black chest hair. Like yarn.
Yarn chest hair.
In the dream, I kept moving from table to table with my lunch tray and my yarn chest hair, and nobody would let me sit down.
12. City Street Blues
The next note appeared on Friday.
All week, I had been checking my locker after each class. This wasn’t always easy to do, since most of my classes were at the opposite end of Charles Lister. Clutching my books against my chest, I would leap out of my seat the minute the bell rang and zigzag down the hall the way people do when they have about three minutes to catch a plane. If I got to the point where I could spot my locker in the distance and there were no yellow squares stuck on the green metal, I would do a 180 and race to my next class.
But on Friday, I stopped at my locker right before lunch and there it was—another yellow square stuck crookedly at eye level. My armpits started to prickle as I pulled the note off the locker.
A large peace symbol was scrawled on the paper in orange marker, along with the same “Elvisly Yours” signature and a smiley face in the corner. Was the peace symbol some kind of warning? Did it have some sinister meaning at Charles Lister that I didn’t know about yet?
That afternoon, I decided not to take the school bus home. I wanted time to think, that’s what I told myself, but I’ll also admit maybe I was feeling slightly paranoid. When you’ve only been in a new school for a week and people you don’t know are obviously watching you and leaving cryptic notes on your locker, I think anybody would feel a little jumpy.
But once I started the couple-mile walk down State Street, lugging two textbooks the size of boulders in my backpack (courtesy of my homework-obsessed World History and Algebra teachers), I felt like an idiot. It had only been a peace symbol, for cripes sake. It wasn’t exactly a death threat.
Cars zoomed by me and the air smelled like hot tar and exhaust. I tried to think about Florida instead of focusing on how much farther I had to walk on the
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