Chapter 2: French Fries and Paganini
“So, Abby. Are you ready for tomorrow?” Frank asks.
We are sitting at the round dining room table. Our dining room is actually more like a den. The walls are lined with book shelves of varying heights and colors. Books are shelved and stacked on every available surface, except for the table, which is covered with a table cloth of Irish linen that Frank and Gigi brought back from Dublin. Dinner is over and we are in a family huddle.
Frank pushes his glasses up on his shiny bald head and beams at me. “High school. That’s kind of a big deal. How do you feel?”
To be honest, I want to throw up.
“Great. I am really looking forward to it,” I say.
Frank looks surprised. Georgia snorts and rolls her eyes, but Mom gives her THE LOOK. Then Mom turns and gives me the OTHER look. The X-ray look, like she is from Krypton and her mother’s intuition is powered by the radiation of our yellow sun. I hate that look. It is like the drawbridge of my soul thumps open when she looks at me like that. It makes me feel like I am six again and I want to climb into her lap and have her stroke my hair and she will tell me that everything is going to be okay and I might just believe her. But I learned a long time ago that just because my mom says it is going to be okay doesn’t mean that it actually will be okay. It never is.
***
I am standing in front of the floor length mirror in my yellow and blue room. The walls are the exact shade of yellow tulips in the spring. When the sun comes through my window it bounces off my yellow walls and it’s like I get a solar recharge—like my heart is a cell phone battery that gets powered up by the light. In the mirror I can see the blue and white willow ware plate Gigi gave me. It’s from a set that has been passed down from mother to daughter since the 1800’s.
I stare at my reflection. It is all wrong. I am still puffy. My face is round, but I’m not jaundiced anymore. I had gained over fifty pounds of water weight during my illness. Turns out a working liver is kind of important. At least my hair is growing back in. It’s still pretty thin, but hunks of it aren’t coming out when I brush it. There is a slight wave in it now. My eyes are brown. Blah. A sigh escapes me as I think of the test results that will come back tomorrow.
To prepare for the big day, I have packed my hypo-allergenic lunch—gluten free, grain free, sugar free, dairy free, taste free and put it in the fridge. Mom had given me permission to use Dad’s beat up leather messenger bag for my backpack this year. It’s beside my desk, packed with school supplies and my school schedule. I have memorized my schedule, but I have the hard copy just in case I panic and forget my next class, my year, or my name.
I carefully lay out my clothes that I am going to wear tomorrow on my blue desk chair. Georgia said that clothes don’t matter as much as they did in junior high. The key is to find the balance between looking nice and looking like you are trying too hard. I will wear Gigi’s blue Tibetan beads on my wrist with my friendship bracelet from Lucy, and the leather band bracelet I got when we went to Yellowstone last year. Accessories decided, I look at my wardrobe choices for tomorrow. Cool retro black Star Wars T-shirt from Frank. It is made of super-soft cotton, emblazoned with the poster art work from A New Hope. The black color will camouflage my chub. Dark wash skinny jeans. Georgia says they look good, and though things have been weird between us for a while, I still trust her when it comes to fashion. Purple Converse high tops. They are so cool; when I wear them I feel like I am ready for anything.
***
It is 2 a.m. and I am still awake. I am now always awake at 2 a.m. The medicine they have me on now has one big side effect: insomnia. But tonight I have more than medication keeping me awake. This morning at my meeting with the school counselor, Ms. Lee had shown me where all my classes were and the fastest way to get there from my assigned locker. That was after we had discussed my special accommodations.
“You don’t have to worry Abigail. This year will be different. Your school counselor from Mt. Olympus told me about the trouble you had with your health. We have a special accommodation that will allow you to make up any work if you miss class. Your teachers will have to give you extra time. Your absences won’t affect your grades. Your school-to-home teacher Mrs. Butler has assured me that you are completely prepared academically for high school. You test scores are high. However, I am sorry to say that you will have to take pre-algebra again.”
Pre-algebra. Thinking of math makes me think of school. Thinking of school makes me think of being sick. Three years ago everything still made sense. Sometimes I have vivid waking dreams of being in the junior high cafeteria again. It is right across the hall from the orchestra room; the room that used to be the center of my life.
***
All of my friends played in the orchestra. I played second violin. I had been working my way up to the front from the back of the pit. Lesser players always get put in the back. In elementary school, Mr. Fergusson would rotate us through the seats so that all of the orchestra would know what it felt like in the front, the middle, and the back. But in junior high you had to fight for your place in the orchestra. No one wanted to be in the back. The back was nicknamed “the dungeon.” People stuck back there didn’t matter. Nobody heard you play. Nobody thought you were special. Nobody sat by you at lunch.
There are two lunch rooms at Mt. Olympus Junior High. In one they serve the boring, normal food. Something green and leafy somehow makes it onto your tray, along with creamed corn and Salisbury Steak. The other line is the salad line. But in the second lunch room—now that is where the social networking happened. Domino’s Pizza delivered like two hundred pizzas before first lunch. The pizza was served with greasy McDonald’s wanna-be fries. They look like they are good fries, but they aren’t. The al a carte line was right next to the pizza line. Tacos from Taco Time, Russell Stover milk shakes and every newly resurrected Hostess crème-filled-anything could be bought in that line. You have to move fast to get to the second lunch room. If you were in the orchestra you had a prime launchpad.
You also had a chance to be in the hierarchy. You know, the social hierarchy—who talks to who, who sits with who—oh sorry, I mean whom. Mom would burn my tongue out with a hot coal if she heard me talking like this—that hierarchy. I had some prime social currency—at least for my school. I was in orchestra. We were the elite. I was practicing more than just three hours a week—the minimum practice requirement. We were working on a Paganini piece. Spring concert was going to be great. I was primed to take the second or first chair in the second violins. Abigail Gordon—second violin, first chair—my place in the hierarchy. Megan Call—first violin, first chair—was actually talking to me like a real human being. And the boys in the cello section had started to take notice. I hit my growth spurt before a lot of the other girls and my hair was super curly and shiny in a good way. My skin was clear and I was getting bigger in all the right places and smaller in the others.
Just that Fall the “cool kids” had asked me to be a part of a string octet of designated troubadours for Medieval Days in Mrs. Butler’s Language Arts class. Bryan, Austin, and Shane now knew me by name and had inside jokes with me from all those hours of practice. Shane was still so short and scrawny—but cool. Very cool. The others protected him. I thought they might protect me too. They were the “cello boys” who somehow crossed the boundary from orchestra kids to student body officers. They always ate in the second lunch room. There was always enough pizza for them and no stale fries.
I was positioned to have the right kind of friends and a prime spot in the second lunchroom hierarchy—just when I started to really feel like I was coming into focus—I got sick. My throat always hurt. My side ached. I was always tired. I was gone from school the entire month of February. When I finally got back to school, still tired but determined to get back to my friends, things were different.
I walked into the Orchestra locker room and went to my locker 381. Everyone was talking about the Spring Dance and getting a group together. Megan walked by without saying hi, or even looking at me. I grabbed my violin case and followed her into the Orchestra room. People were already tuning. Mrs. McCall was pounding out an A on the piano and everybody was sawing away at their instruments. Usually this was my favorite part of class—the mass of assembled sound. I tried to relax into the ritual. My G string always stuck and I usually needed help tuning. I walked over to Mrs. McCall and handed her my instrument.
“Welcome back, Abigail. How are you feeling?” Her chin doubled as she put it on the chin rest.
“I’m okay. The doctor said there might be something wrong with my liver. But I practiced the whole time I was gone.”
“That’s good. You do look a little puffy. And yellow.”
Shane was nearby and made a crack about chubby cheeks and the cello boys picked up the chant. The sound of tuning began to ebb as the class became focused on their chorus. My heart began to pound and my tummy flopped. Puffy and yellow?! Adults weren’t supposed to say stuff like that—especially around twelve year old boys. Chubby cheeks?
“Gentlemen! That is enough!” Mrs. McCall glared them into silence. Tuning resumed. She turned back to me. “You were gone for quite some time. A full month. I am sorry to say that we had to move you to the back. We just couldn’t hold your place for you. I am sure you understand.” She handed my violin back to me and moved on to the next student needing help.
As the bell rang, I realized that I had been relegated to “the dungeon.” I did all that I could to keep from crying as class began. The familiar and comforting sound of scales swirled around me. I was so far in the back I didn’t even have a seat partner. I felt better when it was my turn to report my practicing for the week. Seven hours. During that long month of illness, the only joy I found was in the Paganini. I rocked this piece. I had practiced even though I was sick. I almost had the andante memorized.
Mr. Fergusson, our conductor, took the podium after the practice roll call. He talked to us about the upcoming concert and other pertinent points. Then we began the Paganini. The music was safe. It blotted out the echo of the chubby-cheek chant. The music consoled me. I was going to be okay. I would fight my way back up from “the dungeon.” Mom was always saying I should look on the bright side. So I did. It was going to be okay. I would just work harder. If I could just be perfect enough, I could get what I wanted. No more sitting in the back. Megan would say hi. The boys would be friendly again. I had actually lost weight during my last illness, so maybe I could get some new smaller clothes—the right kind of jeans were really expensive and I would rather get a book, but maybe they would give me the edge.
The bell startled me out of my reverie. As I packed up my violin, carefully wiping the rosin off with a soft cotton rag, loosening my bow, putting the burgundy velvet cover over the strings, I knew I could still make it into the second lunch room in time. Maybe the boys had forgotten the chubby cheeks chant. I stood to take my instrument to my locker.
“Hey Abigail, could you stick around?” It was Mr. Fergusson.
“Sure,” I said. Maybe he had changed his mind about “the dungeon.” Maybe all my practicing would win me back my old seat.
Mr. Fergusson waived me into his sound-proof office. “We haven’t seen you in a while have we?”
He always said “we” when he meant “I”. Sometimes I thought Mr. Fergusson might think he was a king or something. Mrs. Butler had said that the kings of England spoke in what was called “the royal we” and I had read plenty of king talk in my fantasy books.
“Yeah, I have been sick. But I feel a ton better.”
“Oh, well that is good. This seems to happen to you a lot,” he said absently as he counted up practice reports. “I wanted to talk to you about your seat placement.”
I knew it. I had been gone, but I had practiced enough that I could get my seat back. Visions of sitting next to Megan and Shane in the second lunch room bloomed in my mind.
“We had to stick you in the dungeon because of your attendance issue. But that is not what is important. We know that you care about this orchestra. We know that you are a team player. We can depend on you to do what is best for the orchestra.”
I blushed at his words of praise. He had noticed. I was going to get my seat back, maybe I was going to get a seat promotion.
He looked up from the practice reports, and actually looked me in the eyes. His bifocals glimmered in the neon lighting. He smiled. “That is why we know that you will understand when we say that it is probably for the best that you drop the orchestra. . . ”
I could see that he was still talking, but for some reason I couldn’t hear him. It reminded me of when we went to the pool for gym class and were required to jump off the high dive. It was like being in the deep darkness of the ten foot diving pool. All sound became muffled. He was talking about “not holding the others back,” and “creating a strong unified sound.” My head nodded. Smiled.
“Okay, well I will get that taken care of. Thanks for letting me know. I have to go to lunch now.” I grabbed my case and instead of locking it in my locker, I bolted for the second lunch room. This could not be happening. Second chair floated out of my grasp. Megan would never talk to me if I wasn’t in orchestra. How would I get to the second lunch room fast enough if I were in another class? They would all know that I had been kicked out of orchestra. It was hard enough being the kid whose dad died, but now I was the sicko who was holding up the entire orchestra. My stomach lurched again. My head spun. Automatically I got into line. I still couldn’t hear right. The lunchroom was usually boisterous, but I couldn’t seem to get the water out of my ears.
“Sorry. There is no more pizza.”
“Huh?” I snapped to attention.
“Sorry. There is no more pizza.” Cory Anderson, a tall boy with red hair, a thickly freckled face, and really long arms, had been a former bass player in the orchestra until he “accidentally” dropped his thousand dollar instrument off the stage. He was forever known as “butter fingers” and banned from all orchestral circles. He now helped in the lunch room and had to wear a hairnet.
“Hi, Abigail,” he said hopefully.
“Hi, Cory,” I croaked.
“If you want, I can give you some extra fries. It isn’t much of a lunch but all the tacos are gone over in the other line. You are kind of late.”
“Umm, thanks.” I watched as he loaded my plate with stale greasy fries.
In order to pick up the tray I had to sling my violin case over my shoulder where it rode uncomfortably on my back. As I turned to gaze at the clumps of round tables available I wondered if they all knew. No one seemed to make eye contact. These were the cream of the crop of the student body: the officers, the orchestra, the eighth graders. I saw not one friendly face. I also didn’t see any seats. I was relegated to the hall.
Sitting down, my case bumped into the cinderblock wall and my violin clanged faintly from inside. It sounded like a groan. There I was, all alone, outside the second lunchroom. No pizza. No friends. No more orchestra. I would lose my locker in the orchestra room. I would lose my proximity to the only place where I could advance in school society. I was a left over. As stale and greasy as the French fries on my tray—looking like a french fry should, but knowing I wasn’t the real thing. I never went back to junior high again.
That night I dreamed about Luke Skywalker again.
“So, Abby. Are you ready for tomorrow?” Frank asks.
We are sitting at the round dining room table. Our dining room is actually more like a den. The walls are lined with book shelves of varying heights and colors. Books are shelved and stacked on every available surface, except for the table, which is covered with a table cloth of Irish linen that Frank and Gigi brought back from Dublin. Dinner is over and we are in a family huddle.
Frank pushes his glasses up on his shiny bald head and beams at me. “High school. That’s kind of a big deal. How do you feel?”
To be honest, I want to throw up.
“Great. I am really looking forward to it,” I say.
Frank looks surprised. Georgia snorts and rolls her eyes, but Mom gives her THE LOOK. Then Mom turns and gives me the OTHER look. The X-ray look, like she is from Krypton and her mother’s intuition is powered by the radiation of our yellow sun. I hate that look. It is like the drawbridge of my soul thumps open when she looks at me like that. It makes me feel like I am six again and I want to climb into her lap and have her stroke my hair and she will tell me that everything is going to be okay and I might just believe her. But I learned a long time ago that just because my mom says it is going to be okay doesn’t mean that it actually will be okay. It never is.
***
I am standing in front of the floor length mirror in my yellow and blue room. The walls are the exact shade of yellow tulips in the spring. When the sun comes through my window it bounces off my yellow walls and it’s like I get a solar recharge—like my heart is a cell phone battery that gets powered up by the light. In the mirror I can see the blue and white willow ware plate Gigi gave me. It’s from a set that has been passed down from mother to daughter since the 1800’s.
I stare at my reflection. It is all wrong. I am still puffy. My face is round, but I’m not jaundiced anymore. I had gained over fifty pounds of water weight during my illness. Turns out a working liver is kind of important. At least my hair is growing back in. It’s still pretty thin, but hunks of it aren’t coming out when I brush it. There is a slight wave in it now. My eyes are brown. Blah. A sigh escapes me as I think of the test results that will come back tomorrow.
To prepare for the big day, I have packed my hypo-allergenic lunch—gluten free, grain free, sugar free, dairy free, taste free and put it in the fridge. Mom had given me permission to use Dad’s beat up leather messenger bag for my backpack this year. It’s beside my desk, packed with school supplies and my school schedule. I have memorized my schedule, but I have the hard copy just in case I panic and forget my next class, my year, or my name.
I carefully lay out my clothes that I am going to wear tomorrow on my blue desk chair. Georgia said that clothes don’t matter as much as they did in junior high. The key is to find the balance between looking nice and looking like you are trying too hard. I will wear Gigi’s blue Tibetan beads on my wrist with my friendship bracelet from Lucy, and the leather band bracelet I got when we went to Yellowstone last year. Accessories decided, I look at my wardrobe choices for tomorrow. Cool retro black Star Wars T-shirt from Frank. It is made of super-soft cotton, emblazoned with the poster art work from A New Hope. The black color will camouflage my chub. Dark wash skinny jeans. Georgia says they look good, and though things have been weird between us for a while, I still trust her when it comes to fashion. Purple Converse high tops. They are so cool; when I wear them I feel like I am ready for anything.
***
It is 2 a.m. and I am still awake. I am now always awake at 2 a.m. The medicine they have me on now has one big side effect: insomnia. But tonight I have more than medication keeping me awake. This morning at my meeting with the school counselor, Ms. Lee had shown me where all my classes were and the fastest way to get there from my assigned locker. That was after we had discussed my special accommodations.
“You don’t have to worry Abigail. This year will be different. Your school counselor from Mt. Olympus told me about the trouble you had with your health. We have a special accommodation that will allow you to make up any work if you miss class. Your teachers will have to give you extra time. Your absences won’t affect your grades. Your school-to-home teacher Mrs. Butler has assured me that you are completely prepared academically for high school. You test scores are high. However, I am sorry to say that you will have to take pre-algebra again.”
Pre-algebra. Thinking of math makes me think of school. Thinking of school makes me think of being sick. Three years ago everything still made sense. Sometimes I have vivid waking dreams of being in the junior high cafeteria again. It is right across the hall from the orchestra room; the room that used to be the center of my life.
***
All of my friends played in the orchestra. I played second violin. I had been working my way up to the front from the back of the pit. Lesser players always get put in the back. In elementary school, Mr. Fergusson would rotate us through the seats so that all of the orchestra would know what it felt like in the front, the middle, and the back. But in junior high you had to fight for your place in the orchestra. No one wanted to be in the back. The back was nicknamed “the dungeon.” People stuck back there didn’t matter. Nobody heard you play. Nobody thought you were special. Nobody sat by you at lunch.
There are two lunch rooms at Mt. Olympus Junior High. In one they serve the boring, normal food. Something green and leafy somehow makes it onto your tray, along with creamed corn and Salisbury Steak. The other line is the salad line. But in the second lunch room—now that is where the social networking happened. Domino’s Pizza delivered like two hundred pizzas before first lunch. The pizza was served with greasy McDonald’s wanna-be fries. They look like they are good fries, but they aren’t. The al a carte line was right next to the pizza line. Tacos from Taco Time, Russell Stover milk shakes and every newly resurrected Hostess crème-filled-anything could be bought in that line. You have to move fast to get to the second lunch room. If you were in the orchestra you had a prime launchpad.
You also had a chance to be in the hierarchy. You know, the social hierarchy—who talks to who, who sits with who—oh sorry, I mean whom. Mom would burn my tongue out with a hot coal if she heard me talking like this—that hierarchy. I had some prime social currency—at least for my school. I was in orchestra. We were the elite. I was practicing more than just three hours a week—the minimum practice requirement. We were working on a Paganini piece. Spring concert was going to be great. I was primed to take the second or first chair in the second violins. Abigail Gordon—second violin, first chair—my place in the hierarchy. Megan Call—first violin, first chair—was actually talking to me like a real human being. And the boys in the cello section had started to take notice. I hit my growth spurt before a lot of the other girls and my hair was super curly and shiny in a good way. My skin was clear and I was getting bigger in all the right places and smaller in the others.
Just that Fall the “cool kids” had asked me to be a part of a string octet of designated troubadours for Medieval Days in Mrs. Butler’s Language Arts class. Bryan, Austin, and Shane now knew me by name and had inside jokes with me from all those hours of practice. Shane was still so short and scrawny—but cool. Very cool. The others protected him. I thought they might protect me too. They were the “cello boys” who somehow crossed the boundary from orchestra kids to student body officers. They always ate in the second lunch room. There was always enough pizza for them and no stale fries.
I was positioned to have the right kind of friends and a prime spot in the second lunchroom hierarchy—just when I started to really feel like I was coming into focus—I got sick. My throat always hurt. My side ached. I was always tired. I was gone from school the entire month of February. When I finally got back to school, still tired but determined to get back to my friends, things were different.
I walked into the Orchestra locker room and went to my locker 381. Everyone was talking about the Spring Dance and getting a group together. Megan walked by without saying hi, or even looking at me. I grabbed my violin case and followed her into the Orchestra room. People were already tuning. Mrs. McCall was pounding out an A on the piano and everybody was sawing away at their instruments. Usually this was my favorite part of class—the mass of assembled sound. I tried to relax into the ritual. My G string always stuck and I usually needed help tuning. I walked over to Mrs. McCall and handed her my instrument.
“Welcome back, Abigail. How are you feeling?” Her chin doubled as she put it on the chin rest.
“I’m okay. The doctor said there might be something wrong with my liver. But I practiced the whole time I was gone.”
“That’s good. You do look a little puffy. And yellow.”
Shane was nearby and made a crack about chubby cheeks and the cello boys picked up the chant. The sound of tuning began to ebb as the class became focused on their chorus. My heart began to pound and my tummy flopped. Puffy and yellow?! Adults weren’t supposed to say stuff like that—especially around twelve year old boys. Chubby cheeks?
“Gentlemen! That is enough!” Mrs. McCall glared them into silence. Tuning resumed. She turned back to me. “You were gone for quite some time. A full month. I am sorry to say that we had to move you to the back. We just couldn’t hold your place for you. I am sure you understand.” She handed my violin back to me and moved on to the next student needing help.
As the bell rang, I realized that I had been relegated to “the dungeon.” I did all that I could to keep from crying as class began. The familiar and comforting sound of scales swirled around me. I was so far in the back I didn’t even have a seat partner. I felt better when it was my turn to report my practicing for the week. Seven hours. During that long month of illness, the only joy I found was in the Paganini. I rocked this piece. I had practiced even though I was sick. I almost had the andante memorized.
Mr. Fergusson, our conductor, took the podium after the practice roll call. He talked to us about the upcoming concert and other pertinent points. Then we began the Paganini. The music was safe. It blotted out the echo of the chubby-cheek chant. The music consoled me. I was going to be okay. I would fight my way back up from “the dungeon.” Mom was always saying I should look on the bright side. So I did. It was going to be okay. I would just work harder. If I could just be perfect enough, I could get what I wanted. No more sitting in the back. Megan would say hi. The boys would be friendly again. I had actually lost weight during my last illness, so maybe I could get some new smaller clothes—the right kind of jeans were really expensive and I would rather get a book, but maybe they would give me the edge.
The bell startled me out of my reverie. As I packed up my violin, carefully wiping the rosin off with a soft cotton rag, loosening my bow, putting the burgundy velvet cover over the strings, I knew I could still make it into the second lunch room in time. Maybe the boys had forgotten the chubby cheeks chant. I stood to take my instrument to my locker.
“Hey Abigail, could you stick around?” It was Mr. Fergusson.
“Sure,” I said. Maybe he had changed his mind about “the dungeon.” Maybe all my practicing would win me back my old seat.
Mr. Fergusson waived me into his sound-proof office. “We haven’t seen you in a while have we?”
He always said “we” when he meant “I”. Sometimes I thought Mr. Fergusson might think he was a king or something. Mrs. Butler had said that the kings of England spoke in what was called “the royal we” and I had read plenty of king talk in my fantasy books.
“Yeah, I have been sick. But I feel a ton better.”
“Oh, well that is good. This seems to happen to you a lot,” he said absently as he counted up practice reports. “I wanted to talk to you about your seat placement.”
I knew it. I had been gone, but I had practiced enough that I could get my seat back. Visions of sitting next to Megan and Shane in the second lunch room bloomed in my mind.
“We had to stick you in the dungeon because of your attendance issue. But that is not what is important. We know that you care about this orchestra. We know that you are a team player. We can depend on you to do what is best for the orchestra.”
I blushed at his words of praise. He had noticed. I was going to get my seat back, maybe I was going to get a seat promotion.
He looked up from the practice reports, and actually looked me in the eyes. His bifocals glimmered in the neon lighting. He smiled. “That is why we know that you will understand when we say that it is probably for the best that you drop the orchestra. . . ”
I could see that he was still talking, but for some reason I couldn’t hear him. It reminded me of when we went to the pool for gym class and were required to jump off the high dive. It was like being in the deep darkness of the ten foot diving pool. All sound became muffled. He was talking about “not holding the others back,” and “creating a strong unified sound.” My head nodded. Smiled.
“Okay, well I will get that taken care of. Thanks for letting me know. I have to go to lunch now.” I grabbed my case and instead of locking it in my locker, I bolted for the second lunch room. This could not be happening. Second chair floated out of my grasp. Megan would never talk to me if I wasn’t in orchestra. How would I get to the second lunch room fast enough if I were in another class? They would all know that I had been kicked out of orchestra. It was hard enough being the kid whose dad died, but now I was the sicko who was holding up the entire orchestra. My stomach lurched again. My head spun. Automatically I got into line. I still couldn’t hear right. The lunchroom was usually boisterous, but I couldn’t seem to get the water out of my ears.
“Sorry. There is no more pizza.”
“Huh?” I snapped to attention.
“Sorry. There is no more pizza.” Cory Anderson, a tall boy with red hair, a thickly freckled face, and really long arms, had been a former bass player in the orchestra until he “accidentally” dropped his thousand dollar instrument off the stage. He was forever known as “butter fingers” and banned from all orchestral circles. He now helped in the lunch room and had to wear a hairnet.
“Hi, Abigail,” he said hopefully.
“Hi, Cory,” I croaked.
“If you want, I can give you some extra fries. It isn’t much of a lunch but all the tacos are gone over in the other line. You are kind of late.”
“Umm, thanks.” I watched as he loaded my plate with stale greasy fries.
In order to pick up the tray I had to sling my violin case over my shoulder where it rode uncomfortably on my back. As I turned to gaze at the clumps of round tables available I wondered if they all knew. No one seemed to make eye contact. These were the cream of the crop of the student body: the officers, the orchestra, the eighth graders. I saw not one friendly face. I also didn’t see any seats. I was relegated to the hall.
Sitting down, my case bumped into the cinderblock wall and my violin clanged faintly from inside. It sounded like a groan. There I was, all alone, outside the second lunchroom. No pizza. No friends. No more orchestra. I would lose my locker in the orchestra room. I would lose my proximity to the only place where I could advance in school society. I was a left over. As stale and greasy as the French fries on my tray—looking like a french fry should, but knowing I wasn’t the real thing. I never went back to junior high again.
That night I dreamed about Luke Skywalker again.