Absolutely Almost(44)

            “Oh,” I said. I was sort of embarrassed that I thought that Carrot Squash was a food. But then I figured if the video game people didn’t want everyone to think it was a food, then they shouldn’t have named it something that sounded like a food. So really it was their fault. “Is it rated E?” I asked.

            Sage started choking again, and Candace reached around me to pound his back some more. I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes at me when she did it, but I decided not to notice.

            “No,” Darren told me. He only had to whack the ball once and it spun spun spun around the pole until it got so high Lizzy couldn’t reach it even when she jumped up on her tippy-toes. “It’s Teen.”

            “Oh,” I said, when Candace stepped up to play. I put my hands in my pockets. “Then I can’t play it. I’m only allowed to play games that are rated E.”

            Sage was still choking.

            “Do you want my juice?” I asked him, since Candace was playing tetherball now and couldn’t pound his back anymore. I still had a little juice left over from lunch. “I can go get it from my lunch sack.”

            Sage looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew I wasn’t.

            “To help with the choking,” I explained. But he just shook his head. Which was fine with me, because it was probably a bad idea to share juice with someone who kept choking anyway.

            • • •

            Betsy stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. Four straight days, and she wasn’t there. She never came out to the blacktop either. Once I remembered to watch her when we were on our way to the lunchroom, so I could figure out where she went, and I found out it was the library. She went to the library every day.

            Why would someone go to the library during lunch? You’re not allowed to eat in the library. Didn’t Betsy get hungry?

            I wondered what she did with all those gummy bears if she wasn’t allowed to eat them.





helpful hints.




            I still wanted to be friends with Betsy, even if that was hard now. Because of me being cool and her not. I decided the best thing I could do was to do a lot of noticing about exactly what the cool kids did, and then tell Betsy to do those things so she could learn how to be cool too.

            Helpful hints, that was what she needed.

            It was going to be really helpful, actually, because by the end, Betsy would know all the rules for being cool—the ones the cool kids never told you themselves—and who wouldn’t want to know that?

            The only problem was that Betsy didn’t seem to want to talk to me too much anymore. Probably because she was so embarrassed about not being cool. Which made it hard for me to tell her all my helpful hints. But I finally figured out a way to do it. I left a note in Betsy’s desk every morning before school started. A new helpful hint every day.

            Don’t ever be last in the line to go to lunch.

            That was one of my helpful hints. I noticed that was one of the things about being cool, that you always had to get to the lunchroom near the front of the class.

            Sing fake words to the songs during chorus.

            That was another helpful hint. I noticed that one too. Whenever Mrs. Chilcoat came in to do chorus with us, all the cool kids stood in the back and didn’t sing the real words we were supposed to. Some of them were just quiet, no noise at all. But some of the coolest kids, like Sage, made up their own words. Like when Mrs. Chilcoat was teaching us the song “Waltzing Matilda,” Sage kept singing “farting fat Hilda” instead. Which, as far as I could tell, didn’t make any sense, but it must’ve been pretty funny because all the cool kids in the back near us were laughing so hard with their hands over their mouths that they almost got in trouble. So I figured that was a pretty cool thing to do.