The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet (13 page)

Without saying a word to anyone, I slipped out of my chair and crossed the caf. A few seconds later I was standing behind Dezzie. I tapped her on the shoulder. Mauri, next to her, slid a notebook off the table and out of sight. Like I didn’t know what
that
was for. Whatever.

“Hey, it’s Omelette,” KC said. When I glared at him, he gave me a wide, innocent smile.

“Ha-ha,” I said, channeling Ely’s dry sarcasm.

“Oh, I cracked you up!” KC laughed. “Get it? Cracked? Eggs? Omelette?”

I turned my back on him.

“Hi Hamlet,” Dezzie said, tilting her head up to me. “How is your lunch?” Her words were forced.

“Fine,” I said, trying to ignore the curious expressions on Saber’s, Mauri’s, and the boys’ faces. Of course Carter was there too, which made it harder for me to concentrate. He ran his hands through his hair, making it spike up in all directions. Why did he have to be so cute? He was munching on what appeared to be a roast beef and pickle sandwich. He let out a loud burp, and the boys laughed.

Oh, ew.

“Wanna sit down?” Saber asked, acting her part as queen of the table.

“I’m good. But I thought you might want to come over and see Ty and Ely before the end of lunch,” I directed to Dezzie. I hadn’t planned what I was going to say, and the lame words came out of my mouth in a weak trickle.

“Why?” she said, sounding genuinely puzzled. It was as if I was asking her to do something she’d never thought of—like bungee jumping from HoHo’s roof. In Dezzie’s world, I knew she said it because, logically, there was no reason for her to come over to our table—she sees Ty and Ely fairly often and had nothing new to say to them. That’s not how it went over, though. Everyone cracked up like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. KC snorted milk from his nose, but I think he was practicing to do that on purpose.

I fought rising anger and annoyance. “Because they want to see you,” I answered through gritted teeth. Dezzie, for her part, had realized the group’s misinterpretation of her word. A flicker of concern crossed her face, but the laughter brightened her back up again.

“Tell them I’ll see them later,” she said, tossing her hair. “I’ll come say hi just before the bell. I don’t want to miss any
displays
going on at this table.” That last part was said with a knowing glance at the boys.

What? Did she think Carter’s burp-fest was a display? Maybe I was right!

“Yeah,” Mauri said, forcing my train of thought to stop at idiot station. “Why would you want to hang out with them? I mean, they
are
probably talking about nerdalicious stuff like their reading and projects, but whatever.” Mauri flipped her hair to another round of laughs. I took deep breaths through my nose, trying not to make things worse by opening my mouth.

Dezzie nodded. “True, but that’s what you’ve been talking about this whole time. And you’re not nerdalicious,” she added helpfully.

Mauri’s face turned as pink as her new nail polish shade. “Whatever,” she snapped. “Go hang out with your sister if that’s what you really want to do.”

“Yeah,” echoed Saber. “I’m sure her friends are
way
more fun than we are. Maybe they’re talking about the Ren Faire or something.” She gave me a meaningful look. I wanted to give her a meaningful look too, if you get me.

The girls turned to each other over my sister’s head, pretending that Dezzie wasn’t there, and started a conversation about shopping over the weekend. And about how
some
one would have been able to go on the next one if
she
hadn’t suddenly disappeared from the lunch table.

I’d seen it happen before. The two of them were champion ignorers. In two seconds, you could go from being part of their world to just a satellite in orbit. I knew enough not to be interested in being friends with them in the first place, so it had never happened to me, but I’d watched the damage they inflicted on other girls—and now were inflicting on my sister. Dezzie’s eyes narrowed—whether at me or at them, I couldn’t tell.

“Get thee to a nunnery, Hamlet,” she said.

“What?”
I gasped, shocked that a.) she would dismiss me from the lunch table, and b.) that she was using the phrase Mom employed when I was sent to my room for “being impudent.”

“
What
did you just say?”

“Did you hear something?” Mauri asked. A smile danced at the edge of her lips.

“I think there’s a bug in here,” said Saber. She was also trying not to laugh.

“Must I translate? If you prefer:
Get lost
. I’m staying here.” Dezzie turned square to the table and I was faced with the back of her head—and a whole lot of anger.

I bent down so that my mouth was just behind her ear. “You curly-haired
wretch
,” I hissed, throwing another Shakespeare Slam her way. “I am
totally
going to get you for this.” I stalked back to my table.

“How’d it go?” Ty asked, full of concern. “Are you okay?” He reached over to pat my arm or back—something he’d done countless times before, but this time it felt different. Was Judith right? I dodged him, speechless, and scooted my chair farther away from his.

“It tanked, yo. Obviously,” Ely answered for me. His dreads bobbed like ocean buoys. “What were you hoping to do? Get her to come back here with you?”

I coughed and got my vocal cords to work again. “Yeah. Stupid idea, I know.” The bell rang and I stuffed my nearly whole lunch into my bag. I didn’t look at Ty.

“What were they talking about?” Judith asked as we made our way through the crowd to our next class.

“More English assignments, of course,” I said. “And some shopping trip they went on this weekend. They even hinted that they want Dezzie to go next time.”

“Can’t imagine your sister being interested in shopping,” she replied. I shrugged. For all I knew, she could be planning an immersion project on teenage shopping mall habits and the use of sparkly accessories to deliniate social status. We were standing outside of Judith’s French class.

“So,” she said, “have you said anything to Ty yet?”

I was hoping she’d forgotten. “Umm . . . no,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“You need to talk to him soon, Ham,” she said, “or things are going to get strange between the two of you.”

“Like they aren’t already?” I asked, mentally reliving the dodged hand-pat. What if he wanted to kiss me? How was I supposed to deal with
that
?

Eeeeek! That hadn’t occurred to me before.

My best friend probably wanted to kiss me, and that prospect was about as appealing as Mom’s cooking.

v

I do not understand why you are so upset with me, Hamlet,” Dezzie said that night. I’d come home from school and apologized again. Even though I felt like I didn’t need to, I was sick of the silence and awkwardness with my sister. Too much awkwardness in my life these days. We were sitting on her bed, trying to work out what had happened at lunch, Iago snoozing between us. “I’m only doing what you told me to do on the first day of school: blend in. And it’s working.”

How to explain to a genius that sometimes you need more than brains to navigate junior high? I took a deep breath.

“Because, Dezzie, you can’t just insult me in front of them! Then it looks like we’re not on the same team.”

“But you don’t
want
to be on their team,” she pointed out to me for the fifth or sixth time, in a maddeningly patient tone. “You don’t want to be friends with them. They are friends with me.”

“But that’s just it,” I said for what felt like the zillionth time. “They. Are. Not. Your. Friends.” I whomped her pillow on the bedspread to emphasize each word. Iago sprang off the mattress, glared at me, and trotted to the door to be let out.

“Then why would they invite me to go shopping with them this weekend?” Dezzie said, closing the door behind him. She smoothed the wrinkles both he and the pillow had left on the bed.

“Because they want you to help them more!” I groaned and flopped over. “Why don’t you get it?”

“And why do
you
always have to think poorly of them?”

“Because they’re mean and sneaky.”

She didn’t understand.

“I’m not discussing this anymore,” she said. “You may stay if you want to preview our next unit in art class, though.” She pulled a giant stack of books that she’d borrowed from Ms. Finch-Bean off her dresser.

“Fine.” Maybe I’d get another chance to convince her that Saber and Mauri were up to no good. She cracked a surrealists book open. There were lots of paintings of clocks melting, people with distorted bodies and really long legs, and flies.

“Ick,” I said, and slid the book away. “This stuff creeps me out. I like the abstract stuff we’re doing in class so much better.”

“I find the surrealists fascinating,” Dezzie responded. “I am very much looking forward to concluding our Jackson Pollock unit and moving on to these artists who use their imagination to stretch the boundaries of reality.”

“I like my reality just they way it is—with no flies in it. So what do they want to know about the play?” I’d try another tactic. There was no way I was going to let this go. Because if I stopped focusing on Dezzie, I’d have to deal with the pig situation. Or English. And neither option was a good one.

“Elemental things—why the characters are doing what they’re doing, what Shakespeare’s language means, what some of the themes are . . .”

“That’s a lot of the stuff we talk about in class. See? They’re using you.”

“Maybe they don’t comprehend it in class.” Dezzie shrugged and closed the art book. “I need to work on my calculus equations, okay?” She slipped off the bed and went over to her desk. This was my cue.

“Are they nice to you?” I straightened her covers again.

“Of course,” she replied. “Do you think I’d talk to people who openly made fun of me?”

It was the not-so-openly stuff I was concerned about. And the fact that the people who were so nice to her weren’t so nice to me—it wasn’t like Saber and Mauri to be accepting of Kennedy-esque differences.

“You don’t ever wonder why they want you to hang out with them so much?” I asked from the doorway, making a last-ditch effort.

“I’d rather not,” said Dezzie. “It’s the first time I’ve had school friends. Can we not talk about this anymore?”

Her response sank my heart and my desire to prod her any more. Of course it was the first time she’d had friends in school—or been in school, for that matter—and why should I care if Saber and Mauri wanted to know all about Shakespeare from the little genius? She could help them. And anyway, I was going to need her help in pre-al as soon as that test grade came back too. There was no way I’d gotten higher than a D—I hadn’t understood a single question. Of course, if I’d paid better attention, maybe I would have.

If she was helping them and they were nice to her, what did it have to do with me? Even if Saber and Mauri weren’t the kind of people I’d hang out with, that didn’t necessarily make them wrong for Dezzie, right?

 

“Wrong,” said Mr. Symphony in class the next day. He smacked our tests on his desk. Everyone jumped. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. Only two of you received grades higher than a seventy.” He peered at us over the top of his glasses.

At least I wasn’t alone in my failure.

“This is the worst performance by a pre-algebra class that I’ve seen in twenty years of teaching,” he said. His face was growing darker and darker purple, like an eggplant. “Is anyone paying attention in class? Are you making an effort to follow along? Because it doesn’t seem like it.”

We shot guilty looks at one another. No one spoke. Mr. S. wasn’t really expecting us to answer anyway. He was off on a rant. He put the tests down and rubbed his eyes.

“You need to be up to speed before you take exams in December,” he explained in a softer voice. “Those are the qualifiers for your math track in high school. Your final grades just reinforce your placement. So everyone needs to do their best from the very beginning.”

I tuned him out. I already knew I’d bombed the test. And, okay, it was partially as a result of not paying attention in class, but really—why does math have letters in it? Letters + Numbers, like Me + Ty = Two things that should never get together.

“And so, many of you will be attending TLC sessions between now and the next test,” Mr. Symphony finished.

What had I missed now?

“If you received a note from me on your exam, you are one of the students involved in the first round of the pilot program. We’ll begin class as a group, then the TLC students will leave, work with their tutors, and I’ll have a smaller group in class. At the end of four weeks, we’ll switch.” He stifled the groans and complaints with a frown, and passed the tests back.

It was just what I’d expected—a big fat 57 circled in red at the top of the page, a “See me—TLC 1” scrawled underneath it.

For the remainder of the class, I tried to pay attention and take detailed notes on what Mr. S. was saying. By the end of the period, I had a slightly better understanding of
x
and
y
, but only slightly. As much as it didn’t appeal to me, going to TLC would probably save my mathematical future.

When the bell rang, it was easy to see who else had failed as badly as me. Ely and Ty gave me hopeful looks, then left. They were the two who’d passed. Perhaps
they
were actually related to Dezzie.

KC
was
in the group. He plopped his notebook on his head and whispered “osmosis” to me. A giggle escaped me, against my will. At least there would be entertainment in TLC. It was like he was constantly onstage—the spotlight was always on him. Too bad he’d be doing sets in our big production.

“So the prince can’t do algebra either?” he teased. That remark dried up my humor. He’d make a better Puck than me, I thought. Carter, also in our bunch of the pre-al challenged, rolled his eyes. My heart thumped.