Cliques, Hicks, and Ugly Sticks Page 4

  Now, you should know that Lottie has never liked Miss Chestnut, but up to that point, she’d always kept her dislike hidden from everyone but me and Melissa. That Sunday, though, she made snide remarks under her breath all through class. When poor Miss Chestnut would raise her head from her teacher’s quarterly to see who was talking, Lottie looked all innocent and sweet. I glanced back there, and Melissa was all big-eyed like she wished she was sitting somewhere else.

  I reckon Miss Chestnut thought the Tinker twins were talking during class, because she frowned at them right hard. Those two boys are ornerier than all get-out, but not actually mean. I guess she thought they were the ones talking and cutting up, but if Ricky and Micky Tinker are going to say something, they say it right out loud. If they throw spit wads, they are happy to take credit for it. The third time Lottie went, “Blah, blah, blah,” Miss Chestnut pulled her skinny self up to her full 5'1" and glared at the Tinker twins.

  “Ricky and Micky Tinker. You go right to the pastor’s study this minute.”

  In Miss Chestnut’s world, the pastor’s study was the same as the principal’s office. I sincerely doubted Pastor Ross appreciated this belief.

  The Tinker twins looked at each other, then at Miss Chestnut.

  “But we didn’t—” Ricky and Micky said together.

  “No arguments! Go!”

  The boys shrugged and left Sunday school. I gave ole Lottie a narrow look. She looked right at me and patted her big, poufy, permed blond curls, offering a snarky little smirk in return for my glare. Melissa Kay Carlyle squirmed like a fish on a hook, but she never said a word to that bratty Lottie.

  Later, in church, I sat with my parents instead of that Melissa just to show her what I thought of her siding with rotten ole Lottie. Sometimes I liked to sit with Mama and Daddy instead of kids, anyway. It’s nice to hear Mama sing, ’cause she has a pretty voice.

  After a couple of congregational songs, Pastor Ross made the announcements. “I know Christmas is still a ways off,” he said, “but it’s never too early to think about our Christmas program. Lily Reilly and I talked this morning, and we have decided it would be nice for our fine youth group to present this year’s play.”

  Hmm.

  Now, here’s the thing. I did not want to be on that platform, speaking lines in a play. Ever since I recited a poem to a bunch of snooty-snoots back when I was a little kid and they all laughed at me, I have never wanted to recite anything. Not a poem, not a speech, not a Bible verse. Nothing. Period.

  I eyeballed Mama to see if this was her big idea, but she just smiled at me. Then I glanced behind me, where my sister sat with her friends in the teen group, and I saw that the idea of starring in the Christmas play made ole Myra Sue glow like a new lamp. Oh brother.

  Up there behind his pulpit, Pastor Ross was still talking. “Young people, I hope y’all will be willing to serve your church by cooperating when you’re called on. Please be in prayerful consideration if you are asked to help with this. Cedar Ridge Community Church is known for offering a fine pageant for our community, and I trust this year will be no different.”

  I saw no earthly reason why adults shouldn’t do that play instead of us young people, but there is no understanding the grown-up mind. I’ll tell you something right now: I sorta dread growing up, because then I probably won’t understand myself, and somebody surely needs to.

  FIVE

  Grandma Underneath It All

  When we got home from church that afternoon, there sat a pie on the counter, with golden peaks of meringue a mile high.

  “Lemon pie!” I yelled with joy to anyone in my family who cared to listen. Mama and Daddy were still out by the back door of the service porch, smooching right out there in the open on a bright, sunny Sunday, if you can believe that, and my sister had trailed into the kitchen right behind me.

  I touched the side of the pie pan. “It’s warm. Grandma must have just been here.”

  Someone sneezed in the living room.

  “She’s still here!” I grinned real big.

  “She brought us a germ-infested pie,” Myra Sue said, glowering at the wonderful dessert, “and poor Isabel is still recovering just down the hall in the bedroom.”

  “Now, Myra Sue, be nice,” Mama said, frowning at her as she came into the kitchen. Daddy went upstairs to change out of his church clothes, but not before he gave that pie a great big grin.

  “You’re a dipstick, Myra,” I said. “A dipstick, heavy on the dip. You know Grandma always washes her hands when she cooks. Besides, she hasn’t been around any of us since Monday night because she didn’t want to spread her germs.”

  “I don’t care,” said my sister, all uppity. “I am not going to—”

  I left that goofy girl grumbling in the kitchen while I dashed into the front room. Grandma was sitting in the small, faded rocker she always uses when she visits, and she held a blue box of Kleenex on her lap. She had missed her beauty parlor appointment that week, and her colored-from-a-bottle hair was not as fluffy as she’d been wearing it lately. Her face and her blue eyes were makeup-free, and she wore a pair of dark blue slacks and a lavender sweatshirt with a white cat painted on it. That day, she looked more like a grandma than she had since Isabel St. James made her over back in the summer.

  I had about half expected ole Isabel to be in there, too, but I reckon she was still in bed, nursing all her wounds. Probably if she’d tried to come into the living room, Grandma would’ve made her go right back to bed. According to my grandma, bed rest and lots of food will heal you faster than a doctor’s medicine.

  I hugged Grandma and laid my hand against her forehead. Her skin was cool and soft and a little moist. It seemed like a year had passed instead of a few days since I last saw her.

  “How’s your cold?” I asked, kneeling on the floor by her chair.

  “I’m still blowing a bit, but I’m finally drying up.” Her voice was kinda gravelly and nasal. “And Rob said I’m not contagious. He oughta know; he used to be a pharmacist.” I did not want to talk about Rob Estes, whom Grandma had dated a time or two or three. I preferred Ernie Beason from the Grocerteria. He had a stocky build with kinda messy gray-and-brown hair and a gray mustache. To me, he looks like a grandpa, and what’s more, he has liked my grandma for many years. Ole Rob, though—his gray-and-black hair was always styled and neat. He wore nifty glasses that seemed to have no rims, and behind them his eyes were as brown as chocolate. I liked him well enough, but I’ll tell you something: he looked more like a teacher than a grandpa. Besides that, I didn’t think Grandma had any business whatsoever having two boyfriends. One was more than enough. Sheesh.

  “You made a lemon pie,” I said.

  “Yep. Well, I had to do something. I was purely bored, and you know I like to keep busy.”

  “I’ve missed you, Grandma.” I reached up and kissed her cheek. “You’ve never been away so long in my whole entire life!”

  “I didn’t want none of you to catch my cold.”

  “You’ve had colds before and never stayed home,” I reminded her.

  “Well, this time was different, with your mama feeling poorly.”

  I frowned. “So you’ve noticed that Mama hasn’t been herself lately, too?”

  She shrugged. “I know she’s been under the weather.”

  I pulled a face, but I don’t think Grandma noticed, since she was busy blowing her nose.

  “Tell me about school. You learning a lot?”

  I had not wanted to bother Mama or Daddy with school problems, so I was plenty glad to tell Grandma.

  “They are teaching those of us who made really good grades last year an entire section on basic algebra this semester. I hate it.” Then I brightened. “But I like literature. We have this cool teacher, Mrs. Scrivner. She is going to let us write stories next semester.”

  “Well, you oughta be good at that. You got an imagination that don’t quit.”

  I beamed at her. “I know.”

  “Wh
at else is going on?”

  “The food in the junior high cafeteria will make you barf up your socks.”

  “Mercy! That bad, is it?”

  “I’d rather eat roadkill.”

  Grandma tsk-tsked.

  “I am purely starving,” I added fervently.

  “Didn’t you have breakfast this morning?”

  “Yep, but I have to make up for all those days of rotten school lunches.”

  She nodded. “I see. Well, I’ll go help your mama make lunch in just a minute. Think you can make it till then?”

  I sighed. “I guess I can try. Grandma, do you know Lottie Fuhrman?”

  “Of course I know Lottie. What about her, and why are you making that awful face? April Grace, stop that before your eyes stick that way. I thought you liked Lottie.”

  I made a gagging sound. Grandma raised her eyebrows.

  “I used to. We used to be good friends, but she has become a Major Drip.”

  Grandma’s frown deepened so much, you could probably measure her wrinkles with a ruler.

  “Now, why would you say that?”

  “She became someone else over the summer.”

  “Ah.” As if she fully understood, but I know she didn’t. At least not yet, ’cause I had not told her anything. “She’s growing up, is she?” Grandma said. “Well, so are you.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean, she used to be fun. Last spring her and me and Melissa built a playhouse in the hayloft and swore we’d always be friends. And she always comes to my birthday parties and my sleepovers, and I’d go to hers. Now, all of a sudden, she won’t even speak to me.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Lottie,” Grandma said.

  “That’s what I mean! She has turned into the awfullest snoot you can imagine since she went to visit her cousin Cassie in Little Rock all summer. According to Melissa, who hears a lot of stuff because she lives in town, ole Lottie has decided she wants to be in a clique like the one Cassie belongs to in her school. But since there isn’t one in our class, she has created it herself. There are four other girls in her little group and they call themselves the Lotties. Melissa and I call them the Snotties. They even made up a list of Lottie Laws and posted them on the sixth-grade homeroom bulletin board. But I think the teacher took them down.”

  “Laws?”

  “Yeah, rules like, ‘You can’t speak to a Lottie unless spoken to,’ or ‘No one but a Lottie can wear pink hair clips on Tuesdays.’ Stupid, dumb stuff like that.”

  “Well, I’ll swan,” Grandma said, using a Grandma phrase. “I can’t hardly believe little Lottie Fuhrman would act like that.”

  “Believe it, Grandma, ’cause it’s true.”

  She sighed. “I take it you won’t never be a part of the Lotties, April Grace.”

  “No! They’ve been making fun of Jimmy Joe Pitts and the Wilkeses.”

  “I see.”

  Jimmy Joe Pitts has a hearing aid, and he wears thick glasses. The Wilkeses have eight kids, and they are probably the poorest family in all of Zachary County.

  “She calls Portia Wilkes ‘Poor as Dirt Wilkes,’ and on Friday, when Eldon Marcus had an asthma attack, all the Lotties laughed like it was the funniest thing ever. The rest of the day, they kept gasping and wheezing. It was purely awful!”

  “Well, April,” Grandma said, dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex, “just see to it that you stay the same sweet girl you are.”

  Me? Sweet? “I’ll try,” I promised.

  Mama came into the room right then. She smiled at Grandma.

  “Hi, Mama Grace,” she said. “I just looked in on Isabel.

  Ian said she’d taken a painkiller about thirty minutes ago, so she was sound asleep. I believe he could do with a good rest himself.”

  “I’m sure of it!” I offered. “She probably makes him sleep in that chair in the room like she did at the hospital.”

  She did not respond to that. Instead she looked at Grandma and asked, “How are you feeling today?”

  “Much better. The question is, what about you?”

  “I’m fine,” Mama replied dismissively. “Now, don’t you go pushing yourself, Mama Grace. You don’t want—”

  “I’m all right, Lily,” Grandma said, “but I gotta say, you look a mite green around the gills.”

  “I think so, too, Grandma,” I chimed in. “In fact, I think she ought to see a doctor, ’cause anyone with half an eyeball can see she’s not feeling right.”

  “That’s enough, April Grace,” Mama said firmly, sounding irritated. “I said I’m fine and I am, so I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  I looked at Grandma, who just kept looking at Mama, who looked right back at her.

  “How’s Rob?” Mama asked after a short time, as if she wasn’t irritated at all. In fact, you could see she was trying hard not to giggle when she asked that. Irritated one minute, teasing the next. See what I mean? It was so confusing.

  Grandma’s face turned pink. “He got over his cold a few days ago.”

  “But not before he gave it to you,” Mama teased. “You better be careful around Ernie. We don’t want him to get sick, too.”

  “Why, Lily!” said Grandma.

  I did not want to hear that mess! “I hope you two aren’t gonna talk about kissing and smooching because I heard more than enough of that stuff when old man Rance was here.”

  Mr. Rance was a rotten ole horse rancher who tried to hoodwink my grandma out of everything she owned by being all lovey-dovey with her. He almost succeeded, too, except yours very truly did a little investigation and found out what a noxious old goofball he was.

  Mama laughed.

  “You’re living right on the edge, aren’t you, Mama Grace?” she said as she left the room, still giggling. Grandma scowled at the empty doorway.

  I chose not to talk about Grandma’s two boyfriends. It’s bad enough that, thanks to Isabel’s makeover skills, Grandma now dolls herself up and gets her hair dyed and wears makeup and trendy clothes like she’s gonna guest-star on that dumb TV show Dynasty. At least she’s still Grandma underneath all that hair spray and eyeliner.

  “Grandma, you think Mama’s sick, too, don’t you?” I asked real quiet so Mama wouldn’t hear.

  “Child, your mama just said she don’t want any talk about it, so I’m not talking about it.”

  She got up and went into the kitchen to help get dinner ready.

  And that was that.

  SIX

  A Kid Knows When Something Is Wrong

  Now, here’s something I can’t figure out. Why don’t the grown-ups in this house ever think I have a lick of sense? Why do I always have to prove things to them? I reckoned if I had a Polaroid camera, I could’ve taken pictures and showed them how my mama changed as the days passed. I wondered where I could get one.

  The telephone rang and interrupted all my grand thought processes. If you’d lived on the moon, you still could’ve heard ole Myra’s thundering steps as she ran to the hallway to answer it. She acted like she thought someone important was going to call her and tell her how wonderful she was. Well, I coulda told her that wasn’t going to happen.

  “April Grace!” she yelled from the other room. “Telephone.” You could hear the disgust in her voice, and I like to have split my face grinning to know someone had called me, not her.

  “Hey, whatcha doin’?” Melissa Kay Carlyle said the minute I answered the phone.

  To which I said nothing. Because I wasn’t sure if I was still mad at her, but sure as the world, my best friend had confused me by sitting next to that silly girl who had taken it into her head to be rude, crude, and snooty to us both.

  With my fingertip, I traced the pattern of the floral wallpaper on the wall behind our telephone table.

  “April Grace, I know you’re mad at me,” said Melissa, “but I did not sit by Lottie. She came into Sunday school after I did, and she plunked herself right down next to me.”

  I had not thought of that, and I fe
lt the tightness in my belly loosen just a fraction. After all, Melissa has been my best friend ever since we were little kids back in the third grade, and I did not like being mad at her. One thing about our friendship: we can tell each other anything. Kids used to tease us about our freckles and still do sometimes. That right there forged our friendship at first. No one understands freckles like someone who has them. And then we discovered we had a lot of other things in common, too. Such as reading books and liking dogs and certain foods. One thing we did not have in common was family. It’s just Melissa and her mother. No daddy, no grandma, and lucky for her, no sister. Boy, oh boy, can you imagine that? I think it would be great, but she thinks I’m lucky to have a sister, even if it is Myra Sue. Let me tell you something. That girl does not know how lucky she is not to be related to Myra Sue Reilly, the Prissy Pants of the Universe.

  “You could have moved away from Lottie,” I told her, kinda sulky. I tried to poke a fingernail right through a little pink wallpaper rose.

  “No, I could not have! Miss Chestnut was praying the opening prayer. You think I’m gonna get up and change seats in the middle of Miss Chestnut’s prayer? No, thank you!”

  “Well . . . ,” I said, drawing out the moment. I felt bad about being mad at her, but I still think she could have sneaked under the radar of Miss Chestnut’s prayer and sat somewhere else. But my world was all whopperjawed anyway, and I saw no reason to make it even more so by being mad. “All right, then. It’s okay. But, Melissa, I felt sorry for poor old Miss Chestnut. Couldn’t you have stopped ole Lottie from upsetting her?”

  There was dead silence on the phone for a minute. I eyeballed the ivy that trailed through all those little roses and daisies and pansies on our wall.

  “Well, April Grace,” she said, kinda huffy, “what was I supposed to do? Hit her in the head with my Bible? I didn’t notice you doing anything to help.”

  She had a point. I reckon I was as upset at Melissa as I was at myself.