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  “Oh!” I said. “I totally do. Thanks.”

  “Cute ones, like the ones with the big-eyed monkeys you pointed out?”

  For a teeny-tiny moment, I panicked. What if big-eyed monkey notebooks were the wrong kind of notebooks? I imagined me at the front of the class, clutching my wrong big-eyed notebook while the other kids laughed their heads off.

  “Um . . . just boring ones,” I said. I winced as I heard the words come out of my mouth.

  “Boring ones? Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like the Winnie I know.”

  It didn’t sound like the Winnie I knew, either. “You’re right, Mom. You are so right.”

  “So . . . big-eyed monkeys?” she said, amused.

  “Yup, and the bigger-eyed the better.” And it felt good. I wasn’t going to worry about Sandra, I wasn’t going to worry about Mrs. Wilson, and I certainly wasn’t going to worry about something as goofy as notebooks. Goodness gravy.

  Monday night, Ty asked if he could sleep in my room. I said sure, and Mom said sure, too.

  “As long as you both go straight to sleep and don’t stay up chatting,” she couldn’t help but add on. “You both have school tomorrow, you know.”

  “Omigosh, really?” I said. I clutched Ty. “Ty! We have school tomorrow! Did you have any idea, or did it totally creep up on you just like it creeped up on me?” I put my hand over my heart. “School! Tomorrow! Aaaaaaaaagh!!!!!” And I fell over dead on my bed, my arms and legs splayed wide.

  “Okeydoke, Ty, I’m thinking tonight’s not the best night to sleep in Winnie’s room after all,” Mom said. “I’m thinking someone’s a little too wound up to have company tonight.”

  I bolted up. In a tender and concerned nurse voice, I said, “Ty? Are you too wound up to have company, Sweet Pea?”

  “I was talking about you,” Mom said, arching her eyebrows at me.

  “I’m not wound up,” I said.

  “We’ll be good. We pwomise,” Ty said earnestly, and who could turn down a cutie-pie face like his?

  Not Mom. She listened as we said our prayers, kissed us good night, told us she loved us, and turned off my bedroom light.

  Once she was gone, Ty said, “Winnie?”

  I rolled over onto my side. Even in the dark, I could make out his brown eyes gazing at me from behind his shock of hair. “Yeah?”

  “Are there bullies at Twinity?”

  “What?” I said. I was shocked. Really and truly shocked. “How do you even know what a bully is?”

  “I don’t know. Are there?”

  I thought of television bullies, kids who stuffed other kids into lockers and made them eat yucky cheese. “Not at Trinity.”

  He let out a puff of relief.

  “Hold on, though,” I said. I loved Ty, and so I needed to be honest, just like Sandra was honest—usually—with me. “There aren’t bullies. But there might be kids who . . . aren’t exactly the most wonderful kids on the planet.”

  Under the covers, Ty pulled his knees toward his chest. “So what do I do? What do I do if I see one of those kids?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you.”

  He waited.

  He waited some more.

  “When will you tell me?” he asked.

  “Right now,” I said. It had taken me a minute to figure out my response, because I’d never had to deal with a bully myself. But then the answer came to me, and I knew it was right because I felt it to be right. “Remember that girl Erica, from the pool?”

  “Is she going to be at my pweschool?”

  “No. I’m just bringing her up as an example.”

  “How do you know she won’t be at Twinity? Did you call her?”

  “Erica is not going to show up randomly in your preschool class,” I said firmly. “But even if she does—which she won’t—maybe she’s changed.”

  Ty furrowed his brow. I could tell he had little faith in a new and improved Erica.

  “You’re right. Erica probably hasn’t changed, because kids like her take a long time to ripen.”

  “Like bananas?” Ty asked.

  “Yes, and to tell the truth, she might not ever fully ripen, because that’s the kind of person she is. But that’s not the kind of person you are.”

  “Because I’m a nice banana.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And there won’t be any mean kids at Trinity, but if there are, just walk away. If they say something mean, just walk away again, because guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Nobody gets to choose how to make you feel except you.” I tapped Ty’s nose. “Got it?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re going to love school,” I said. “School rocks.”

  “Okay.” He squiggled up close, and the wrinkles in his forehead went away. “Love you, Winnie,” he said, and just like that, he fell asleep.

  The next morning, I walked into Ms. Meyers’s class with butterflies in my stomach. The smell of whiteboard markers and new erasers filled the air, as well as the smell of fresh, clean hair. Everyone looked older. Karen’s hair was short now, and Louise had pierced ears. I was jealous, and I told her so. Mom wouldn’t let me get mine pierced until I was eleven!

  I greeted person after person, swirling through squeals and fist-bumps and loud rowdy chatter. Energy bounced from one person to another, and it was so cool, because I could feel it. I felt that fifth grade energy, and I grabbed hold of it—or maybe it grabbed hold of me!—and I twirled out of pure joy.

  When I came to a stop, I spotted Amanda. My face split into a grin, and I bellowed, “Amanda! Get over here, ya big lug!” I flung my arms wide. “Mama needs some lovin’!”

  “Omigosh,” Amanda said, pretending to be mortified. She came over, but she was too self-conscious to give me some lovin’, so I picked her up around the waist.

  “I’ve missed ya!” I said, still using my loud voice. It was fun to use my loud voice. “What’cha been up to, you old scoundrel?”

  “Since last night when we talked on the phone, you mean?” She gave me a you-are-weird look, but she smiled despite herself.

  Chantelle found us, and I dropped Amanda and hugged her.

  “Chantelle! My favorite Chantelle in the world! How are you?”

  “Squished,” she said, wiggling away from me. She turned to Amanda. “Have you told her?”

  “Told me what?” I said.

  “I was waiting for you,” Amanda said. “But you’re here, so now I will!”

  I looked at her suspiciously, unable to get a vibe on where this was going. Amanda seemed awfully perky, even perkier than normal. Possibly even fake perky, as if she was using all that perkiness to cover up something else.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said, perching on my desk. She was in her back-to-school outfit, which was a pink denim skirt and a white blouse with capped sleeves, and she looked adorable, of course. How could she not? She was Amanda. She was Amadorable! Amandable?

  A mandible! Ha! We’d learned about mandibles last year in science. They were like jaws, like cricket jaws. I snapped my cricket jaws—snap, snap, snap.

  “So what do you think?” Amanda said. She searched my face eagerly. “Do you?”

  I stopped snapping. Had Amanda been talking the whole time I was mandible-ing? Huh. I did vaguely recall some background noise going on, but I’d accidentally tuned it out.

  “Um . . . would you repeat the question?” I said.

  Amanda and Chantelle shared a look, which I didn’t like one bit. I only liked shared looks when they were shared with me.

  “She was saying that we’re in fifth grade now,” Chantelle said.

  “Yes!” I said, because I knew that. I totally knew that. I thrust my fist into the air. “Fifth grade! Yay, us!”

  Chantelle grabbed my fist and quickly pulled it back down. “Winnie,” she said, almost if she were embarrassed.

  “I was reminding you about how fifth grade is different from fourth grade,” Amanda said. “You know. Like my mom said.”


  I narrowed my eyes. I thought Amanda had dropped all that dumb stuff her mom said. Since I myself had no desire to revisit the subject, I made spooky fingers to distract them. “Oooooo! Fifth grade! We might have to do”—I gulped audibly—“ decimals!”

  “We’re being serious,” Amanda said. “Could you be serious, too? Please?”

  That made me feel weird. “Uh, o-kaaay.”

  “Chantelle and I talked it out, and . . . well . . . change doesn’t have to be a bad thing, right? Being older means so many things, and some of them could be super-fun. And at first I was all worried, but Chantelle helped me not be.”

  I lifted my eyebrows incredulously. “Chantelle helped you not be worried?”

  “And you did, too,” Amanda hastened to add. “The point is . . . I mean, I guess we were maybe thinking . . .”

  “Just say it,” I said. I no longer even wanted to do spooky fingers, because when, exactly, did Amanda and Chantelle do all this thinking? And where was I? Why wasn’t I doing all that thinking with them?

  Again, Chantelle and Amanda looked at each other. It made something snap inside of me, and I clapped my hands in front of their faces. “Stop looking at each other! You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and what?! What is this BIG THING you have to tell me?”

  “Shhh!” Chantelle said.

  “Thatit’stimewehadcrushesonboys,” Amanda said in a rush.

  I waited for the words to separate and make sense. They didn’t. “Huh?”

  “Boys,” Chantelle said, boring her eyes into mine in what was supposed to be a meaningful way, I think.

  It didn’t seem meaningful to me. It seemed dumb, and also annoying, because it seemed obvious that Amanda had been talking to her mom again, and getting bizarre ideas planted into her brain.

  “What about them?” I said in a steely tone.

  Amanda and Chantelle giggled. They giggled, and Chantelle swept her arm to indicate the kids in our class.

  “They’re everywhere,” she said, making Amanda giggle even harder.

  “So?” I said. Yes, there were boys in our class. There were also desks. There was also a fish named Larry who lived in a bowl on Ms. Meyers’s desk. Mr. Hutchinson, who taught sixth grade, even had a snake in his room. So what was the big fluffy deal about boys?

  And yet that’s all Amanda and Chantelle wanted to talk about, and not just Amanda and Chantelle, but Louise and Karen and Maxine, too.

  Boys, boys, boys. Blah, blah, blah. And the worst part? The most ridiculous part in the history of the United States? Amanda and Chantelle thought we should each claim a boy to have a crush on. That was their top secret, stupid idea.

  “I am not in that stage,” I informed Amanda and Chantelle during lunch. Since it was warm out, we were eating on the playground.

  They didn’t believe me, so I informed them again. “I. Am. Not. In. That. Stage. Boys are fine. Sometimes. But does that mean we have to go boy crazy?”

  “That’s what girls do in fifth grade,” Amanda said. She said it like it was a law, and not only that, but a law she approved of and found intoxicating. She wanted to be boy crazy, and so did the others. Everyone but me.

  “We’ll help you,” Chantelle said.

  “We will,” Amanda said fervently. “We’ll find the perfect crush for you.”

  I glanced at Amanda, and then at Chantelle. Notebooks I could handle. Cupcakes I could handle. But boys and boy craziness and crushes?

  I was angry at Amanda’s mom, a definite first. Because when Mrs. Wilson told Amanda all that malarkey about how she should expect a lot of changes this year, and how one of the changes would be the whole issue of boys . . . well, what was she thinking? Did she mean to send her darling daughter down this boy-crazy path? Was that her goal?

  “I already know who my crush is,” Chantelle said.

  Amanda joined her in supplying the answer. “Tyrone!” they said together, collapsing against each other in a girly, mushy pile of mashed potatoes.

  I felt trapped. I also felt . . . itchy inside. Or something. If I walked away from their boy craziness, would someone else plop into their mashed-potato pile in my place?

  Impossible—and yet deeply deeply dizzy-making.

  Amanda took my peanut butter and jelly sandwich from me and placed it on my plastic bag. She took my hand, her eyes shining. “So . . . ? You’re excited, right?”

  I mustered what enthusiasm I could. My smile felt like it was made out of plaster. “Fifth grade boys, here we come!”

  October

  There was something rotten going on at Trinity. An evil force was at work, and I wasn’t lying. Call it the moon, call it the ghost of Halloween past, call it gargle-gurgle-glug .

  Or! Or! Speak the unspeakable and call the rottenness by its real name. Call it—gulp—gag—stagger about with hands at throat—Alex Plotkin.

  Oh, that Alex. Just thinking about him made me narrow my eyes, because he was irritating and disgusting and deserved to be put in a cage. That’s what Sandra said, and she didn’t even know Alex. All she knew was that he was a boy, and in her opinion, all boys should be caged. For real, that’s what she said.

  It was after we’d gotten home from school. I’d gone in search of her, needing her advice, and I’d found her sitting on her bed doing her homework. I knocked lightly on her cracked-open door, but she didn’t look up. I walked across the room and stood beside her. She still didn’t look up.

  I cleared my throat.

  I cleared my throat again, with bonus sound effects suggesting the possibility of a hairball on the verge of being coughed up. Finally, still not lifting her head, she growled, “For heaven’s sake. If you’re going to say something, say it.”

  “Well, if you insist,” I said.

  I plopped down beside her, and she clutched her textbook to keep it from sliding off her lap. I wiggled and squirmed to settle myself into her mass of pillows—it took a while—and then I let it all pour out: Amanda’s and Chantelle’s boy craziness, the silliness of crushes, and the well-documented fact that I WAS NOT IN THAT STAGE YET.

  I wasn’t in that stage because I had far better ways to spend my time, I told Sandra. Like making sculptures out of wire coat hangers, bottle caps, shoe boxes, and Mom’s jewelry stand, which was shaped like a tree. And which Mom reclaimed when she saw that I’d borrowed it, much to my annoyance.

  That annoyance was an isty-bitsy spider compared to the gargantuan tarantula annoyance of Alex Plotkin, however. “Gargantuan” was one of my spelling words this week. It meant huge, enormous, and elephantine. So basically, Alex was as annoying as an elephant-sized tarantula, and I couldn’t imagine anyone not being annoyed (to say the least) if an elephant-sized tarantula showed up randomly on their doorstep and said, “Hey, how ya doin’, you got any snacks?”

  I explained all of this to Sandra, who said that if he was that bad, then I should put him in a cage and be done with it.

  I lifted my eyebrows. I wasn’t sure how practical her idea was, but I liked it. “Are you being serious?”

  “As a heart attack,” she replied, her eyes glued to her textbook. “Boys are nothing but trouble. If it were up to me, I’d lock them all up—and I’d keep them locked up until they were twenty-one or stopped making fart jokes, whichever came first.”

  I felt more hopeful than I had in weeks. If Sandra, who was in the ninth grade, would rather put a boy behind bars than have a crush on him, did that mean I wasn’t a freak after all?

  I bit the bottom left corner of my lip. It was new for me, this particular lip-biting expression. I’d invented it yesterday while staring at myself in the mirror, and it made me look pensive, I thought. Like a girl, but also a spy. A spy-girl, which I was considering dressing up as for Halloween. It wasn’t written down in cement, though. A hobo was also up for grabs.

  I released my lip, since I couldn’t bite my lip and talk, and since Sandra hadn’t noticed, anyway.

  “So, this whole crush business,” I said. “You’re saying y
ou don’t have a crush on anyone? And that’s allowed, even in high school?”

  Sandra put down her pencil and regarded me for the first time since I’d entered her room. Our faces were right next to each other, and her blue eyes seemed very . . . blue. My cheeks grew warm, but I held my ground. I needed to know.

  “Well, first of all, allowed is the wrong word,” she said. “There’s not a rule book, you know. Not for fifth grade or high school.”

  “I know!” I said, because that was the same thing I’d told Amanda, back before fifth grade began. There was no rule book. Then it occurred to me that Sandra had avoided the real question. “So you do have a crush on someone?”

  “Did I say that? No.”

  “Have you ever had a crush one someone?”

  Her feet were crossed at the ankle, and she rotated the top one in a small circle. “Sure, but not this very second.”

  “Then when? How old were you? What grade were you in?”

  She studied me. “Hmm. We’re skipping that question. Now, back to Alex Plotkin.”

  “Bleh,” I said.

  “You seem to have strong feelings when it comes to this dude, Winnie. Which brings up an interesting question: Why?”

  “Because he’s gross!” I cried. “Because his mom said he wasn’t allowed to pick his nose with his finger, so now he picks it with his big toe.”

  “Ew,” Sandra said.

  “Uh-huh. And once he ate dog food on a dare. He’ll eat anything on a dare, and then he breathes on you.”

  “Double-ew!”

  “Uh, yeah! And on the playground, he spins around and around with his eyes closed, and then he rams into people. He claims it’s an accident, but it’s not. He peeks, and that’s how he picks his targets. The truth is he just likes to knock kids down.”

  Sandra looked like she’d smelled something bad, like chewed-up dog food mixed with boy-spit. “So . . . you don’t have a crush on this Alex guy.”

  “What?!” I jumped off the bed, my skin crawling. “Ew ew ew! Sandra! Ew w w w!”