When I was in sixth grade, I’d thought junior high would be hard, with changing classes, thick books, and mysterious subjects like algebra. Liz was the smart one, not me. But despite the intimidating names, such as literature and comprehension, social studies, and home economics, the courses themselves were no big deal. Literature and comprehension was just reading. Social studies was just news with a little history thrown in. And the first thing we learned in home economics—required for all seventh-grade girls—was how to set a table. Knife on the right side of the plate, facing in; spoon next to that; forks on the left, lined up in the order they were to be used.
Our teacher, Mrs. Thompson, was a big, slow-moving woman with a powdered face and earrings that always matched her necklace. She said she was teaching us “survival skills” that every woman needed to know. But you were never going to die because you put the spoon on the left side of the plate. The seventh-grade guys got to take shop and learn all these interesting, useful things, like how to fix a flat tire, how to wire a lamp, how to build a bookcase. When I told Mrs. Thompson that fixing a flat tire—not setting a table—was my idea of a survival skill, she said that was a man’s job.
We weren’t even learning practical stuff, like how to keep a budget or how to sew on a missing button. It was all about being proper, knowing where the water glass stood in relation to the juice glass, and the need for correct foundation garments. Mom wouldn’t be caught dead in a girdle, and some of her friends didn’t wear bras, but Mrs. Thompson was always going on about how you should never be able to see a woman’s body jiggle under her clothes, which was why all women should wear girdles—an essential foundation garment—and it was a shame in this day and age that so many of them had stopped.
It was so boring I couldn’t even listen. I would have flunked the first test, except Mrs. Thompson said she’d give us bonus points for every kitchen utensil we could name. Most of the girls listed five or six, but I really went to town, coming up with everything I could think of, from pizza slicers to cheese graters to nutcrackers, swizzle sticks to apple peelers to rolling pins. I ended up with thirty-seven.
“This doesn’t seem right,” Mrs. Thompson said after she graded the test. “You’re one of my poorest students, but you got the best score in the class simply because of your bonus answers.”
“You made the rules,” I said.
Soon after that first test, I learned that you could get out of home ec one day a week if you joined the pep squad. So, without really knowing what the pep squad was, I decided to volunteer. Our job, it turned out, was to help the cheerleaders rev up the crowds during pregame pep rallies on Fridays, the day of the football games, and then at the games that evening. We also made the spirit stick—a painted broomstick gussied up with Bulldog doohickeys—which was awarded to the class that showed the most spirit during rallies, and we painted the posters that went up in the hallways before each game.
Byler’s first game that year was against the Big Creek Owls. When we met in the gym, Terri Pruitt, the senior who was the leader of the squad, said we needed to come up with owl-themed posters. When I told Liz about it, she rattled off a string of really neat owl puns and rhymes we could use—“Pluck the Owls,” “Disembowel the Owls,” “Befoul the Owls,” “Owls Are Foul Fowls,” and best of all, “Bulldogs Growl, Owls Howl.”
“Why don’t you join the pep squad?” I told Liz. “You’d be great.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “The whole thing’s too tribal.”
At the next meeting of the pep squad, I read out Liz’s list of slogans. Terri loved “Bulldogs Growl, Owls Howl.” She said we could make a big banner by spray-painting the words on an old sheet and hanging it on the gym wall for Friday’s pep rally. She turned to Vanessa Johnson, the one black girl on the pep squad, who was also in my English class. “Vanessa, you can help Bean,” Terri said.
“So I’m the help?” Vanessa asked. She was taller than most of the girls, with long, athletic arms and legs. She crossed those arms slowly and stared at Terri.
“We’re all helping each other, okay?”
Terri found the sheet and spray paint and had us take them outside. As we walked down the hall, I started telling Vanessa that we should outline the words in pencil first, to make sure we got them centered and they didn’t scrunch up at the end.
“Who put you in charge?” she asked.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “It was just an idea.”