The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter (7 page)

The audience broke into boos. But I wasn’t totally sure why. I always thought green was a pretty lame color.

“But we kept the gold and we’ve added purple. So they are your new school colors. Purple and gold!”

We all cheered at this, because apparently we were all huge fans of purple and gold.

“And as you might have read in the handout, we’re still finalizing our mascot. We’re deciding between the grizzly bear and the gray wolf. The second week of school we plan on holding a class vote!”

Then I heard a very embarrassing sound. My dad and Mr. Bradshaw were chanting, “Wolf, wolf, wolf.” And then, as if my reputation didn’t matter at all, Mr. Bradshaw howled like a wolf.

Blake scooted down the bench, away from his dad. I could relate. I wished Blake had sat by me, because maybe we would have hit it off.

As the people started to file out, my dad stayed to talk to Mr. Bradshaw.

“Bye, Blake,” I said. “I’m going to go find my locker and my classrooms.”

Blake shrugged at me.

I said to my mom as we climbed down the stairs, “Blake isn’t very friendly.”

“He’s a boy. At this age they often act like clams.”

We found my locker right away.

“It’s in a good spot,” my mom said. “Right by the stairs.”

I had no idea why that made it a good spot.

“I wonder where Sylvie’s locker is,” I said. I sort of wanted to see it. If we ever made up, which seemed doubtful, I thought maybe I would leave a sticker on it. For her birthday.

“Do you remember her number?” my mom asked.

I shook my head. I felt terrible, because even though Sylvie had told me her number, I’d forgotten it.

My mom and I wandered the halls until we found all six of my classrooms. Lots of people were doing the same thing. If I’d gone to elementary school with them, I’d have known which kids were the ones I wanted to be friends with and I could have struck up conversations with them. But I didn’t. So I spent a lot of time judging them by their shoes. I figured anybody wearing superwhite sneakers was a dork. And anybody wearing smelly old sneakers was a dweeb. My shoe-based potential friendship–evaluation process got trickier when kids wore shoes that weren’t sneakers.

Lots of girls were wearing shoes that looked like ballet slippers. They looked pretty and comfortable.

“I like those shoes,” I told my mom. “They might be made out of velvet!”

My mom lowered my schedule and looked at the wrong shoes. I pointed my finger in the direction of the correct shoes as they walked out the door. “There! There!” I said.

“Do you want to ask her where she got them?”

“No,” I said. Because that girl was basically gone. Then I looked at my shoes and realized that they had grass stains on them. I hoped that nobody had noticed and judged me. We walked out of the classroom.

“This way,” my mom said, pointing down the hallway to the stairs. I followed her all the way to the gym. “Well, those were all your classrooms.”

But there was a problem. I had already forgotten where they were.

“This place is a maze,” I said.

“You’ll learn it,” my mom said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I watched other kids talking in groups by their lockers. I wondered how long it would take me to meet people I wanted to talk to by my locker. I wondered what kind of person would have the locker next to mine.

After we rounded a corner, we ran into my dad, staring into the trophy case. Inside it they had pictures of all the sports teams from every year since the school was built. They also had group pictures of the cheerleaders. They looked so happy. I stared at their glossy smiles. I
wondered if I would be as happy in middle school as they were.

“It feels like it was just yesterday that I was a seventh grader strutting down these halls,” he said.

I looked back at the trophy case and then at my dad. “Well,” I said, “it’s been a lot longer than that.”

really wanted to call Sylvie. But more than that, I wanted Sylvie to call me and apologize for switching schools and abandoning me and letting her mom read my list of fifth-grade regrets. And then I wanted her to switch back schools. But she never did that. It made my life feel pretty empty. And it was only getting emptier.

I sat on Grandma’s bed while she packed for her trip with Willy. I hadn’t even seen her check her email in days. Which meant that she didn’t know about all of her potential boyfriends on her now-active E-Date Me Today account. It was a big bummer. I should have tried to wreck her relationship with Willy, the maniac welder, a long time
ago. Because now she was really leaving and there was nothing I could do. I felt like I wanted to puke, and I never wanted to do that, even when I had the stomach flu.

“You look so sad,” Grandma said.

I watched her fold her bathing suit and put it inside her giant duffel bag.

“I am so sad,” I said.

“Have you given up on your visualization exercises?” Grandma asked.

I nodded. “Pretty much.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“Don’t be a moper. Stay positive.”

“I will never be friends with Sylvie again because Mrs. Potaski positively hates me.”

“Mrs. Potaski doesn’t hate you,” Grandma said.

I slapped the bed. “Of course she does. She thinks I’m a bad influence. I’m not a bad influence. I’m just excited about life and so I seek out interesting things to do.”

Grandma packed a stack of bras and looked at me with a lot of concern. “I’m going to tell you something my grandma once told me.”

And I braced myself, because Grandma Lefter’s grandma had been raised on a farm and so her advice usually had something to do with cow herding or weasel removal.

“If a bull is chasing you through a field, it doesn’t do
you much good to ask yourself, ‘What does this bull have against me?’ ” Grandma patted my knee lovingly and resumed packing. “Just step aside until the bull forgets about you.”

“I detest bulls,” I said.

“And maybe the bull resents that,” Grandma said.

This advice seemed pretty unhelpful. Grandma smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back.

“My life sucks.”

I tried not to watch Grandma pack her underwear. She was taking a lot. “Bessica, your life doesn’t suck. Everybody has jitters before the first day of school.”

“Jitters?” And that’s when I realized that Grandma was so busy thinking about her upcoming trip with Willy that she had overlooked the magnitude of my situation.

“I’m not going to know anybody,” I said. “Don’t you remember? Teton Middle School got too crowded and so they decided to split the sessions into North and South. North is early-day and South is late-day. Sylvie and I lived so close to the border that we got to choose, and I chose North and so did she. When I start middle school I will know zero people.” I held up both of my hands and bent my fingers to make a circle. “Zero.”

“Some people consider zero to be a good starting point.”

Then I started getting very frustrated, because my own
grandma didn’t understand how horrible my life had become.

“I won’t know the dorks from the dweebs. In fact, I might be mistaken for a dork or a dweeb. I don’t even know what these people wear! For all I know they might dress in beaver pelts.”

“Calm down,” Grandma Lefter said. “Other than actual beavers, you won’t encounter anyone clad in a beaver pelt. It’s not that dramatic.”

But this only made me talk louder.

“I am going to get shoved into a trash can. Or somebody is going to challenge me to a fight on the T.”

“It’s been my experience that only underweight boys get shoved into trash cans, because it’s a very gender-specific form of hazing. And what’s the T?”

“It’s this concrete area in front of the school that’s shaped like the letter
T
. And it’s where seventh and eighth graders lure unsuspecting sixth graders so they can smack them around and knock them out.”

“Bessica, is that true?”

“It’s totally true! That’s why I’m mentioning it.”

“Well, if somebody challenges you to a fight on the T, I want you to run and get a teacher as fast as you can.”

This wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all. Then my mom called down the stairs.

“Willy is here,” my mom said.

Willy walked into Grandma’s room wearing a belt buckle the size of a hubcap. And then he gave her a quick smooch and I felt myself gag a little.

“I’m almost done,” she said.

“I think I’m going to make myself a cup of tea,” Willy said.

“Good idea,” I said. Because he was ruining my conversation with Grandma. And also my life.

Then she looked at me with a very serious expression and zipped up her duffel.

“Bessica Lefter, I want you to remember who you are and where you came from,” Grandma said.

“I know. I know,” I said. “The pioneers.”

“No, I’m talking about your name.” She smiled at me in a very forced manner. “Do you know who chose your name?”

“Grandpa Lefter,” I said. I’d heard this story before. But I didn’t interrupt her.

“He wanted you to be named after a gifted and original woman. Dr. Bessica Raiche built an airplane out of bamboo and silk in her living room. She used bicycle wheels and a marine motor to make the propeller. And in 1910 she became the first American woman to intentionally pilot a solo flight. She had a mind ahead of her time.”

And I didn’t bother bringing up the fact that Dr. Bessica Raiche had crashed the plane later that day.

“You are very special,” Grandma Lefter said. “And I have no doubt that when you show up at North Teton Middle School, you will win friends left and right.”

I could feel my throat tighten. I wanted to believe what she was saying.

Then I heard Willy coming down the stairs again. And I looked at Grandma and asked a very serious question. “Don’t you wish that Willy had a boat?”

She smiled. “Boats are nice, but I like Willy just the way he is.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So you do wish that he had a boat?”

And then boatless Willy the Maniac Welder walked into Grandma’s room and I couldn’t stand looking at him, so I left.

he motor home was packed and I stood on my lawn ready to die. Grandma had her arm around me, but I just kept glaring at Willy.

“When will you be back?” I asked even though I already knew. I figured making her admit to staying away for that long would make her feel tremendously guilty.