“Maybe she is cool,” I said when we were all grabbing our lunches from our cubbies. Betsy was frowning at me talking to Darren, and I didn’t like it. “She never raises her hand in class either.”
Darren snorted. “Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy,” he said, “is not cool.”
I was starting to think I didn’t get what was cool and what wasn’t.
I told Darren I needed to talk to Mrs. Rouse about something, and I’d meet him in the lunchroom. But I didn’t really have to talk to the teacher. That was a lie. After Darren left, I made sure no one was looking, and I snuck over to Betsy’s cubby, where she was busy unstuffing her coat.
“Hi,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, which was pretty normal, but usually she looked at me while she didn’t say anything, and this time she wasn’t looking at me, so that didn’t seem normal at all. I didn’t like it.
“Hey, um, Betsy, do you know how to play Pokémon?” I asked her.
Betsy did look up at me then, and she looked confused-mad. Which was not a look that made me happy. I did my best to try to explain to her.
“Because all the cool kids play Pokémon,” I said, “and I’m cool now, so I’m learning it, and I thought if you knew too, then you could be cool with me and then we could still sit next to each other at lunch. Wouldn’t that be good?” I thought it sounded good. “Anyway, if you don’t know Pokémon, I could teach it to you. When I get better, I mean. I’m still not very good.”
I must not’ve been doing a very good job explaining about Pokémon and being cool and lunch and everything, because Betsy went from looking confused-mad to just mad-mad. Which was even worse.
But I didn’t get a chance to explain any better, because Betsy started talking then, and even though it took her a long time to get the words out—longer than normal—I waited for her to say what she wanted and didn’t interrupt because Betsy hated when you interrupted her before she was done, and I was nice. And cool.
“N-n-n-n-no.” That’s what she told me. “Y-y-you are n-not c-c-cool.”
I couldn’t believe I waited for that.
Then she stormed off to the lunchroom. She forgot her lunch bag in her cubby, and I thought about bringing it to her, but then I decided not to. I wasn’t feeling very nice right then.
Just cool.
That afternoon was the first lunch of the whole school year where I didn’t get any gummy bears.
still.
What the heck is your sister doing in there anyway?” I asked Erlan when I was over at his apartment. We were playing Operation, only we couldn’t play it in the quilt fort because Erlan’s sister Ainyr was in there crying.
“She broke up with her boyfriend or something,” Erlan told me. “She won’t shut up about it either.”
That made me so surprised I dropped the funny bone I was tweezering out and the game buzzed at me. “She has a boyfriend?” I asked. “She’s only in seventh grade.”
Erlan took the tweezers. “She’s in eighth,” he said. He got the funny bone easy. “And she doesn’t have a boyfriend anymore. That’s what she’s so upset about.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, she’s being a real baby. They only went out for like a week.” He said that loud enough for Ainyr to hear from inside the fort.
“You shut up, Erlan!” she shouted at him.