The Kind of Friends We Used to Be by Frances O'Roark Dowell Page B

hand.
    “The writing’s pretty good, but it’s all facts and no story,” he said after Ms. Vickery called on him. “If I want to read history, I’ll read a history book.”
    Kate sat back in her seat, stunned. She’d been thinking the same thing, only she hadn’t been able to find the exact way to say it, unlike Matthew Holler, who’d nailed it right on the head. She turned to look at him, but he was doodling in his notebook. Look at me, Kate tried to ESP-message him, but he didn’t.
    “Well, I think you’re very much mistaken,” Madison told Matthew, her voice catching a little in her throat. Kate thought Madison might be about to cry, but it looked like that kind of crying that happened when you were so furious it was either cry or start screaming at the top of your lungs. “Anyway, what makes you so great? Let’s hear what you wrote.”
    Madison crossed her arms over her chest and looked at the rest of the group, smirking. Matthew Holler shrugged and picked up his notebook.
    “It’s a haiku,” he said. “That means—”
    “A haiku is a form of poetry that originated in Japan,” Madison jumped in. “Five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.”
    “Why don’t you let Matthew handle this, Madison?” Ms. Vickery said.
    Madison harrumphed under her breath.
    “Yeah, whatever, what she said,” Matthew continued. “Anyway, this is called ‘October Night’:
    “Cicada alone
    Left to sing in the bare trees
    Where did the sun go?”
    It was not the poem Kate would have expected from a boy who looked like Matthew Holler. It was like a sad, sweet note played on a violin, held two seconds longer than the rest of the music. Kate wished she could raise her hand and say this, but she thought it would sound stupid when it came out of her mouth. Still, when she saw that Madison was about to say something, Kate jumped in, because she wasn’t about to let Madison LaCarte, the most boring writer in the world, ruin the poem for everyone else.
    “That’s really beautiful,” Kate said. Her face suddenly felt hot, but she forced herself to keep talking. “I mean, it’s exactly the way the end of October makes you feel.”
    The girl next to her, Lorna, nodded. “I liked it a lot too,” she said. Several other girls nodded and murmured, “Me too.”
    “Why does the cicada wonder where the sunwent when it’s night?” Madison asked. “Isn’t that kind of a stupid question?”
    Kate looked at Matthew, who shrugged away Madison’s remarks, like he wasn’t interested in defending his poem. “It is what it is,” he said.
    “Nice work, Matthew,” said Ms. Vickery, ignoring Madison’s hand, which had popped up again and was wriggling wildly in Ms. Vickery’s direction. “Now, who would like to read next?” She surveyed the room. “Kate?”
    “Uh, I’m not sure I’m totally ready to read,” Kate said, even though she had two new Dallas songs in her binder, freshly printed out on crisp, twenty-pound bond paper in Palatino Linotype font. She was about to say, “No, maybe next week,” when she felt Matthew Holler looking at her. She turned to look at him, and he mouthed Read at her. Yeah? she mouthed back, and he nodded.
    She looked at Ms. Vickery. “Uh, it’s song lyrics,” she explained. “I’ve been mostly writing songs, like I said last week.” She cleared her throat and wished her hands weren’t so shaky. “Uh, okay, I guess I’ll start reading.”
    She read the lyrics to “A Little Bit of Something Sweet,” a song about Dallas running into a girl he used to know back in fifth grade, only now she’s fourteen, like Dallas, and the sort of girl like Kate would like to be, funny and smart-mouthed, nice underneath her tough exterior. She liked the chorus of the song a lot, which if she were singing the lyrics, she would have sung three times, once after each verse, but since she was speaking, she only read the chorus once:
    “A little bit of something