The Secret Language of Girls (9 page)

I am not weird,
Kate thought.
I am just myself.
And then Kate wondered if that was what Elinor Pritchard said to herself every morning before coming to school, where most of the kids never said a word to her.

Kate walked over to Elinor’s table. “Have you written the world’s greatest poem yet?”

Elinor looked down at her notebook and shook her head no.

“Come on,” Kate said, nodding toward the library exit. “Let’s go to the cafeteria and get some ice cream. Maybe it will inspire you.”

Kate sat at the kitchen table, eating graham crackers and looking over the poems she had written the second day in the library with the visiting poet. She wished she had made a copy of her poem that Sara Catherine Toole had chosen to put on the library bulletin board. It was about friends who sometimes didn’t get along for reasons no one could
figure out. Kate had called it “Talk to Me.”

“Listen to this line,” Sara Catherine Toole had said to the nine very good writers of the sixth grade after they’d handed in their poems. “ ‘A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark.’ That’s beautiful! Can anyone besides Kate tell me what that means?”

Elinor Pritchard raised her hand. “I think it means that if someone’s really your friend, they’re always with you, no matter if you can see them or if they’re even in the same room with you,” she offered shyly.

“Wonderful!” Sara Catherine Toole exclaimed. She held up Kate’s poem. “We have a real poet here, folks.”

A real poet. Kate had tasted those words all the way home on the bus. That’s what Sara Catherine Toole said poets did—they tasted words.

Someone tapped on the kitchen door. When Kate went to open it, she found Courtney in
her green frog jacket holding the same sock she’d found two days before.

“Buddy told me whose sock this really is,” Courtney said, walking inside and taking a graham cracker from the box. “You want to know whose?”

“Sure,” Kate said, sitting back down. “Why not?”

“Santa Claus!” Courtney said, practically falling down from excitement. “Buddy saw him last Christmas Eve! You know what else Buddy told me? He said that Rudolph isn’t really one of Santa’s reindeers. That’s just on TV.”

“Really?” Kate said. She laughed. “What else does Buddy know about Santa Claus?”

“Well,” Courtney said, her face scrunched up with the effort of coming up with a good story, “there’s lots of things he knows.”

Kate leaned back in her chair. She was ready to let Courtney talk as long as she wanted. She was in the mood to be nice to everyone, even
her annoying six-year-old neighbor and Buddy, the invisible friend.

“That was a good poem,” Marylin had said to her that morning as they’d left the library for lunch. Five small words followed by a hint of a smile.

Five small words. Kate could taste them.

She was pretty sure there would be more.

The day Marylin fell in love with Mr. Kertzner, her nature studies teacher, she decided the only person she would tell was Aunt Tish, who was staying at Marylin’s house to recuperate after her divorce from Uncle Nick. Marylin thought the news of her budding romance with Mr. Kertzner might cheer Aunt Tish up and make her see that love was still alive in the world.

Marylin found Aunt Tish eating a Snickers bar and reading
Scientific American
on the living room couch when she got home from
school. Aunt Tish, who was an astronomer, had taken to resting in the afternoon and staying up half the night in the backyard looking at the stars through her telescope. In times of turmoil, she was fond of saying, infinity can be a very comforting concept.

Marylin kept meaning to write that down in her diary.

“He sounds like a dream,” Aunt Tish said when Marylin described Mr. Kertzner to her: how every Tuesday he wore his Mickey Mouse tie with the stain in the shape of Texas on it, and how his aftershave smelled just like the nutmeg kringles her father made at Christmas.

“I’ve always had a fondness for older men myself,” Aunt Tish said, handing Marylin half of her Snickers bar. “My first big love was Galileo, who was about four hundred years older than I was at the time. But with a mind like that, you can overlook the little things.”

“That’s exactly how I feel,” Marylin said,
nodding, even though she couldn’t exactly remember who Galileo was. “Mr. Kertzner knows everything there is to know about the gypsy moth. I find it fascinating.”

This was not entirely true. What Marylin found fascinating was the way Mr. Kertzner practically leaped on top of his desk when describing the gypsy moth’s destructive eating habits. It was like somebody had suddenly set his socks on fire.

“Well, maybe we should invite this Mr. Kertzner over to dinner one night,” Aunt Tish said. “You could show him the telescope. Fascinating men are always fascinated by telescopes.”

It had not occurred to Marylin that you could invite a teacher to your house. When she ran the idea past Flannery the next morning on the bus, Flannery’s mouth widened into a humongous O, as though a doctor had just asked to look at her tonsils.

“You can’t ask a teacher over to dinner!” Flannery exclaimed. “It just makes the teacher think you’re trying to get a better grade from them. Nobody asks teachers to dinner!”

“Why not?” Kate asked from the seat behind Marylin and Flannery. Flannery and Marylin were now speaking to Kate. But Flannery never scooted over to let Kate sit with them, so every morning Kate had to lean forward and rest her chin on the back of their seat if she wanted to join in the conversation. “I bet Mr. Kertzner would like to have dinner at your house.”

“Do you really think so?” Marylin asked, craning her neck so she could look at Kate. She ignored Flannery’s glare. Flannery didn’t like it when Marylin got second opinions.

“Sure,” Kate answered. “Just because he’s a teacher doesn’t mean he’s not a human being. Everyone likes being asked over for dinner.”

By the time the bus pulled up in front of school, Marylin had made up her mind. She
would do it. She would get Aunt Tish to make her famous vegetarian lasagna. She would show Mr. Kertzner Venus through the telescope. At night Venus is called the evening star, Marylin would tell Mr. Kertzner. Next to the sun and the moon, it is the brightest object in the sky.

How could he help but fall in love with her?

“Marylin, can you tell me the stages of the gypsy moth’s life span?”

Mr. Kertzner’s voice startled Marylin from the daydream she was having about their wedding. In her dream Mr. Kertzner was wearing an emerald-green tuxedo that matched his eyes.

“Um, well,” she stammered, trying to shift gears in her brain. “Let’s see, there’s the pupil stage . . .”

“Yeah, when the gypsy moth starts kindergarten,” Matthew Sholls yelled out. Everyone
laughed like they thought this was very funny, but Marylin didn’t find it funny at all.

“I bet you mean the pupa, don’t you?” Mr. Kertzner asked kindly.

Marylin nodded miserably. She wished she were
in
a pupa. She turned around to get a sympathetic look from Ashley Greer, but Ashley was busy rolling her eyes at Elyse Cassill. That’s all Marylin needed, to have someone like Ashley Greer turn against her. She’d probably get Flannery turned against her, too, and then Marylin’s only friends would be Kate and the wildly destructive gypsy moth.

Mr. Kertzner stopped Marylin on her way out of the classroom for morning break. “Your mom called me last night about having dinner at your house next Tuesday,” he told her. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Really?” Marylin asked. She had thought Mr. Kertzner probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her after the moth fiasco.

“Sure!” Mr. Kertzner said, smiling. “Usually I just eat TV dinners and watch the news. A home-cooked meal is like a vacation in paradise for me.”

Marylin walked out into the hallway feeling as light as a balloon. She decided to learn everything she could about the stars before Tuesday so she could show Mr. Kertzner through Aunt Tish’s telescope. Marylin nudged out of her brain the idea that Mr. Kertzner might be more impressed if she learned everything about the gypsy moth before Tuesday. The gypsy moth destroyed fruit crops and was a menace to society, which didn’t make it the subject for romance, in Marylin’s opinion. The stars, on the other hand, were as romantic as a valentine.

Flannery and Ashley were hanging upside down on the jungle gym when Marylin reached the playground. Flannery was the only seventh grader who hung out during break at
the playground. She claimed that so far she hadn’t met another kid her age with an IQ over 90. The fact that Flannery chose to spend break with her made Marylin feel like she was practically a teenager.

“I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it,” Ashley was saying to Flannery, sounding distressed and patting Flannery’s upside-down shoulder with her upside-down hand.

“What’s wrong?” Marylin asked as she grabbed on to a pole and lifted herself up onto the bar next to Flannery’s knees.

“I was just telling Ashley that my doctor says I have really weak ankles,” Flannery said, “which means I can’t try out for cheerleading.”

“Oh,” Marylin said, balancing herself on the bar so she wouldn’t flip backward or flop forward. She already knew about Flannery’s ankles. Flannery’s weak ankles were the reason she said she couldn’t do a cartwheel. But what was this business about cheerleading?

“I was a cheerleader last year,” Flannery continued, swinging back and forth from her knees like a pendulum. “When I lived in Texas. All the best cheerleaders are from Texas. It’s a fact.”

Ashley peered suspiciously at Marylin. “You’re not trying out for cheerleading, are you?”

“Maybe,” Marylin said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

Flannery pushed herself off the bar with her hands and landed neatly on her feet. “I’ll coach you,” she told Marylin. “I know all the tricks.”

“What about me?” Ashley asked.

Flannery smiled her sweetest smile. “You don’t need any coaching. You’ll be a shoo-in.” She grabbed Marylin’s arm, saying, “Come on. I’ve got to go to the bathroom, and then I’ll start giving you advice.”

As they walked toward the building, Flannery glanced back at Ashley, who was still
hanging upside down on the jungle gym. “Don’t you think she sort of looks like a bat, hanging that way?”

Marylin giggled. She was going to be a cheerleader. That would show old Ashley the Bat.