Absolutely Almost(9)
I bet no one noticed either that when Mr. Onorato came in for science last year and asked who thought the tall, skinny glass could hold more water than the short fat one, I was the only kid who raised my hand wrong. I bet no one noticed, because I raised it really quick, and then I noticed nobody else had their hand up, so I put mine down. And I sit in the back anyway.
(It was a trick question besides, because both glasses held the same exact amount of water. Somehow everyone else knew that already.)
I bet no one even noticed I stopped raising my hand in class.
I don’t think anyone but me notices any of those things. I’m really good at noticing.
I hope I’ll always be a better noticer than everybody else.
lunch.
Erlan’s sister Ainyr told me that the hardest part of going to a new school would be lunch. “If you don’t have anybody to sit with,” she told me, “then everyone will think you’re a loser. If you sit with other loser kids, then everyone will think you’re a loser too. If you sit with kids who are way cooler than you, and they don’t want to sit with you, then they’ll think you’re a loser. You have to find kids to sit with who are just a little bit cooler than you, but not too much. Then everyone will think you’re cool too, but not trying too hard.”
When she said all that, it made me really scared. Because it sounded super hard to figure all that out, and what if I messed up?
Lucky for me, at my new school, everybody had to eat lunch with their same class, so I didn’t worry too much once I figured that out. Everybody in Mrs. Rouse’s class sat at one long table in the middle of the cafeteria. Mostly it was boys on one side, and girls on the other, but it was mixed up a little bit.
I was sitting next to a girl who was tons shorter than me, even sitting down. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor. I looked at her lunch as she pulled it out of her brown paper lunch bag. Turkey sandwich with no crusts, cut at an angle. A box of apple cranberry juice. Carrot sticks. It looked like a healthy lunch, but loads better than mine. I had leftover kimchi and a cold bagel with cream cheese, which is what Mom gives me when she forgets to make my lunch the day before. I have that lunch a lot. I looked around the table. Nobody else had kimchi. Almost everybody had sandwiches. I zipped the kimchi back inside my puffy green lunch sack.
While I chewed my bagel, I looked around the table and tried to figure out who Erlan’s sister Ainyr would think was cool, and who she would say was a loser. But I couldn’t really tell. Everybody sort of just looked like a fifth-grader. There was a boy with spiky hair and a kid with a skateboarding shirt. One of the girls had a panda lunch box, which at my old school would be lame, but she seemed like she had a lot of friends, so maybe here panda lunch boxes were okay. I wondered who made up the rules about what was lame and what wasn’t, and who was cool and who was a loser. If somebody told me what the rules were, I’d be fine.
While I was thinking all that, the girl next to me, the short one with the healthy-but-good lunch, pulled another thing out of her lunch bag.
“Gummy bears?” I said. “Cool.” I love gummy bears.
The girl looked up at me and smiled. It was kind of a funny smile, actually, like she was surprised I was talking to her. But before she could say anything, the boy across from me who was wearing the skateboard shirt—I think Mrs. Rouse called him Darren—said, “Ew, Albie, don’t talk to Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy.”
I don’t know why he said her name like that—Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. But when I looked at the girl, it seemed like she definitely didn’t like it. Her shoulders were sunk down, and her face was red, and somehow she looked even smaller than before.
“Don’t call her that,” I said to the skateboard shirt boy. Darren. “That’s mean.” I didn’t know why it was mean, but sometimes you could tell that a person wasn’t being nice, even if you weren’t sure how.