Gertie's Leap to Greatness (8 page)

“Let go,” said Jean, tossing her head so that her hair whipped Gertie's face.

A test paper fell in front of Gertie, and Ms. Simms's big neat handwriting jumped off the page at her.
Great job! 99.

Gertie screamed. She clapped her hands over her mouth. She had never before made a 99 on a test. Ever. And it made her feel like a new person, like the kind of person who could make 99s on tests. Gertie pulled her hands an inch away from her mouth. “Oh my Lord.”

Ms. Simms smiled. “Well done, Gertie,” she said.

Junior was stealing glances at Jean and eating his own shirt collar. Jean stood up and slammed her chair under her desk.

“Of course, I made a one hundred on that test.” Mary Sue's voice floated across the room from where she was standing by the cubbies, fastening her shiny silver coat buttons and talking to Ella.

Gertie's hands were still at her face. She lowered them slowly.

“Schools are much more advanced in California,” Mary Sue said, then smirked at Gertie over her shoulder as she walked out of the room.

Gertie looked back at the 99 and the
Great job!
She wanted to rip the exclamation point off the page, brandish it like a sword, and chase Mary Sue Spivey down the halls. She stuffed her test in a book and banged the cover on it.

When she looked up, Ms. Simms was watching her. Her teacher tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Gertie, may I speak with you,” Ms. Simms said. It wasn't a question.

Gertie frowned at her friends. Junior shrugged to show that he didn't know what she wanted either. But Jean didn't even look at Gertie. She headed for the door, her back ruler-straight.

Gertie waited until everyone had left and she was alone with her teacher. She walked to Ms. Simms's desk, which was heaped with papers and calendars and referral slips and glue sticks.

Ms. Simms put her elbows on a stack of worksheets and folded her hands. “Gertie, is anything bothering you?”

Gertie stared.

Itchy tags in her shirt bothered her. Having to sit still in church bothered her. Audrey Williams plucking leaves off her bonsai tree to feed her imaginary friend bothered her.

But right now she wasn't bothered. She was panicked. She had sharp pains in her chest and maybe it was a heart attack and she was going to be the first ten-year-old in the world to have a heart attack and when the doctors asked what happened, she'd moan, weakly,
Mary Sue Spivey did it to me.

Ms. Simms cleared her throat, snapping Gertie out of her daydream. “I've noticed that you're working harder than ever on your schoolwork,” Ms. Simms said, “and I'm proud of you. But it also seems like something's upsetting you.”

Of course, it wasn't some
thing
upsetting Gertie. It was some
one
. But Gertie couldn't tell Ms. Simms about Mary Sue. She wouldn't believe her. Mary Sue always pretended to be nice when teachers were around. Ms. Simms hadn't seen Mary Sue's smile when she'd basically ripped a Swiss chocolate out of Gertie's hands. She hadn't seen the scheming look in Mary Sue's eye as she broadcast to the whole world that she'd made a perfect grade on her test. Gertie felt she could bear it if her teacher
knew
how awful Mary Sue was, but Ms. Simms wouldn't believe her, and that made the whole thing even worse.

She shook her head.

“Is it about Career Day?”

“No!” Gertie said. Career Day was the
last
thing she wanted to talk about.

Ms. Simms sighed. “Okay, Gertie.” She leaned back in her chair. “You know you can talk to me if you need to, right?”

Gertie nodded as she turned to go, but she knew she would never be able to talk to Ms. Simms.

*   *   *

Outside, kids were yelling and horns were honking and parents were barking orders. Gertie hooked her thumbs in her backpack straps and scuffed toward her bus. A flutter caught her eye. A new paper was taped to the school's brick wall. Gertie walked over to it.

The Clean Earth Club is having a party!
the flyer said.
Refreshments will be served. RSVP,
the flyer said. Gertie's shoes were stuck to the sidewalk. The bottom of the flyer flapped in the wind. Students and parents were walking past the sign, glancing at it. Hot shame washed over Gertie, and without thinking about what she was doing, she tore the paper off the wall. She shredded the offensive paper into ribbons that floated to the ground in slow motion as if she were in a movie—no, a
film
, of course a film. The last shred fluttered to the sidewalk, and the clapstick snapped down on the clapperboard.
Cut!

And Gertie knew that she was in trouble. Big trouble.

Mary Sue was standing still in the churning crowd of students. She looked from the ground to Gertie. Gertie was sure Mary Sue was going to punch her in the face. That's what Gertie would've done to someone who ripped up her invitation. She braced herself.

But Mary Sue looked down at her invitation again. And then a smile flashed across her face so fast that Gertie might've imagined it. She must have imagined it because a second later it was gone, and two tears that sparkled like diamonds slid down Mary Sue's cheeks.

Gertie swallowed. “Mary Sue, I didn't mean—”

Gertie didn't have time to say whatever it was she hadn't meant because suddenly
everyone
was there.

“Aww, don't cry.” Roy tucked his football under his arm and patted Mary Sue on the back. He looked at Gertie like he'd never seen her before.

Gertie felt her shoulders pull up. “I—” They needed to understand that
she
wasn't the mean one here. That it just looked bad. That she hadn't meant to do it.

“I'll come to the party, Mary Sue.” Ella turned to Gertie. “What did you do to her?”

Everyone was saying at once that they would become Clean Earth Club members. They all stood behind Mary Sue and glared at Gertie.

“I didn't … I…”

Someone was tugging on her sleeve.
“Gertie,”
whispered Junior. He pulled her back. “Let's go, Gertie.”

 

12

There's
Right
and Then There's
Right

Aunt Rae said that sometimes you had an awful, horrible, rotten day and you were sure that nothing was ever going to be right again, but then you had a good sleep and the next morning your Twinkies tasted creamier than ever. And everything was okay. Or at least not as bad as you had thought. Sometimes you realized it was all in your head. Sometimes you realized everything was going to work out for the best, which was nice. But this was
not
one of those times.

The next morning Gertie trudged through the kitchen, dragging her book bag by its straps.

“Give 'em hell, baby,” Aunt Rae said.

Gertie moaned.

When she got on the bus, everyone whispered and glared at her. Even the driver's toothpick pointed at her accusingly.
You,
the toothpick seemed to say.
You're the one who made that wonderful California girl cry.

Her Twinkies tasted like despair, sort of sticky and empty at the same time, and the first-grade boy in front of her watched her take every bite.

When Ms. Simms began their math lesson, Gertie reached into her desk for her pencil. It was broken. She pulled out another pencil, and it was broken, too. Every one of her pencils was snapped.

“Ms. Simms,” she said, “I don't have my pencil.” Gertie could feel everyone watching her. “I must've left it at home,” she said.

Ms. Simms sighed and found a spare one in her desk drawer.

Gertie bent over her work and tried to concentrate.

*   *   *

She was trying her hardest to do well at school, but whenever Gertie felt like she was making progress, something seemed to go wrong.

The broken pencils were just the beginning. Homework assignments went missing from her cubby. Her own cubby! When it was Gertie's turn to read aloud, Ella would cough and cough so that Gertie couldn't even read through one sentence. During tests, when Ms. Simms wasn't looking, rubber bands would sting the back of her neck.

At lunch one day, she was eating her pear salad at a table with Jean and Junior and glaring at a flyer for the Clean Earth Club that was taped on the cafeteria wall.

“
She's
the one who's doing this.” Gertie stabbed a pear with her fork and pointed it at the flyer. “I can't prove it. But she's—”

“Gertie.” Junior's eyes followed her fork, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead. “What's—”

“—doing something sneaky with her club.” Gertie blinked. A wrinkled Band-Aid was stuck to the pear she was about to bite.

“Yech!”
She shook her fork until the pear and Band-Aid flew off the tines and splatted against the wall.

Laughter burst from behind her, and she turned to see Roy and Leo bent double they were guffawing so hard. Ewan Buckley stood beside them. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and pulled up one pant leg. His permanently scraped knee was uncovered and oozy and had a distinctive Band-Aid-shaped pale spot. A shudder shook through Gertie's body like it was looking for a way out.

The Band-Aid peeled off the wall and dropped to the floor.

Jean snorted into her milk.

Gertie stared at her. “You're not on their side, are you?”

Jean shrugged. “Well, you know, Mary Sue is right about pollution.”

Junior looked from one of them to the other. “Who can say for sure?” He gulped. “I mean, there's
right
and then there's
right
. And then there's right and … and
left
 … and…” Junior's voice trailed away.

“You just have to be the center of attention, as usual,” Jean said to Gertie.

“That's not true! That's not what this is—”

“If you want to be my friend, you won't try to be smarter than me. Friends don't do that.”

Gertie looked at the wrinkled Band-Aid on the cafeteria floor. “I don't want to be better than you,” she started to explain. “I have to … I have to because…” She took a deep breath. “Because I want to … because before my mother leaves I want to…” It was something that was perfectly obvious but very difficult to put into words. Like trying to explain the meaning of toes to Audrey. “I want to show her I don't need her.”

Their lunch table was a pocket of silence in the noisy cafeteria. This was where Jean was supposed to say she understood.

“But being the smartest is
my
mission,” Jean said. “Being the smartest is important to
me
.”

Gertie stared at her. She had just told Jean that she was on a very important mission, and Jean didn't care. Her best friend should have understood.

“We're always doing your missions. But what about what I want to do?” Jean slammed her milk carton on the table. “It's not fair.”

Gertie swallowed. She hadn't known that Jean wanted to have her own missions. She would've helped Jean with her missions, even though they probably would've been really boring because Jean didn't have a good imagination like Gertie.

“Well?” Jean said.

Gertie didn't know what to say. “I would help you if—”

Jean's nostrils flared. “Do you want to be my friend or do you want to keep on with your stupid mission?”

Gertie reached for her locket. Best friends weren't supposed to call your mission stupid. And best friends were supposed to be forever. “I'm not giving up,” she said.

Jean did not tremble like a volcano about to blow. Instead, she went very still, and for some reason Gertie knew that was worse. Jean's eyes fell away from Gertie's face, and she stared at her lunch tray. Then she picked up her plastic fork slowly, like it weighed a hundred pounds, and she began to eat her lunch, chewing each bite a million times before she swallowed.

None of them said anything. Junior tried to pass Jean the maraschino cherries from his pear salad, but she ignored him.

Gertie poked her own fork through her food, looking for more Band-Aids.

 

13

People Are Fickle

“Aunt Rae!” Gertie yelled. “Aunt Rae!”

Aunt Rae hurried into the kitchen. “What's the matter?”

Gertie threw her arms around Aunt Rae's middle. “Everybody hates me.”

Aunt Rae rubbed Gertie's arms like she was trying to warm her up. “Who hates you, baby?”

“Everybody!” said Gertie. “The thing is, they loved me. They
loved
me, but now they hate me.”

Aunt Rae clicked her tongue. “What happened?”

Gertie stepped out of her aunt's arms and plopped into a kitchen chair. “I accidentally tore up an invitation—”

Aunt Rae's forehead wrinkled.

“—to Mary Sue's party.”

“Gertie!”

“It was an accident! And honestly, Aunt Rae, it was a little thing.” Gertie held her fingers apart half a smidge to show Aunt Rae. “I didn't do it to be mean. You've got to believe me. It's a horrible club party thing. And they've been all up in my cubby. Nobody would've gotten upset by a…” Gertie took a deep breath.

“Okay, okay! I believe you.”

“You do?” Gertie looked up.

Aunt Rae nodded. “I believe you.”

“Oh.” At once the kitchen seemed less dingy. The pot bottoms gleamed a little brighter.

“So why does everybody hate me?”

Aunt Rae got a glass and filled it with water. “People are fickle.” She set the glass in front of Gertie.

The word
fickle
sounded cute and wee, thought Gertie. It didn't fit at all. Her classmates were mean and awful and—