“But you never sit,” Becca pressed. “Like . . . ever.”
And before I could either drop my plate, or say anything, Becca bumped the girl next to her, who then bumped the girl next to her, who bumped the girl next to her who happened to be Macy Franks, folding her teriyaki streaked plate into a Styrofoam half-moon. They all scooted over, squishing together, making a sliver of free space on the seat. Was this some kind of joke? A trick? A scheme for Becca to milk me for info about Frida or something? Either way, I was tired of eating standing up, so I set my plate down, slowly climbed over the bench, and slipped my legs under the table. Then, as if none of this was a big deal, Becca turned back to her conversation—a ditzy discussion about music in space—and I turned back to my salmon teriyaki. Yeah. Kinda awkward.
After lunch it was time for my favorite girl group. I mean, history. Ms. Lanford was standing at the board, chewing the last bit of her lunch, as we all filed in and took our seats in our assigned-group clusters.
“Don’t forget to figure out when you’re going to meet outside of class to work on this. Not everything can be done in school.” Ms. Lanford wiped crumbs from the corners of her mouth. Looked like she may have had crackers for lunch. Definitely not salmon teriyaki. “Hopefully, today everyone is prepared to share with their partners some more new findings about the person you all have chosen.”
“Hey,” I said first, scooting my chair up to the desk. T-N-T sort of spoke back. Sometimes their hi’s sounded more like humphs. But only to me. Their hi’s to Becca came with weird no-touch hugs. But whatever.
“Hey, Patina.” Becca beamed, much warmer than the other two girls. As if I hadn’t just been sitting next to her at lunch. She pulled out the materials we put together yesterday. Well, really, the stuff I put together. The photos of Frida I found on Google. Then the three of them looked at me like I had something magical to say.
I returned the stare. Blank face.
“So . . . anything new we should know about . . . um . . .” TeeTee started but couldn’t remember Frida’s name.
“Frida.”
“Yeah, Frida. Anything new we should know about her?” She cocked her head to the side. I imagined her brain oozing out of her ear.
“You tell me.” Me = running out of patience.
“I watched the movie about her online last night,” Becca blurted out, all excited. “Um, well, I watched some of it. There’s Spanish in it, and that threw me off. But I saw the part where she was in school and on the bus with her boyfriend, who by the way was hot, just saying, and the bus got in an accident and gold dust went everywhere and the next thing you know, Frida is just lying there all bloody. A mess. And then she’s got a cast over her whole body. She painted butterflies on the cast after the cute boyfriend moved to Europe, which I was like, what? No! So . . . yeah.”
T-N-T turned their attention back toward me to see if Becca was right. As if I was some kind of expert on gold dust, butterflies, and blood.
“That’s wassup, Becca,” I said, smiling, nodding. “But there’s some details you left out.” Here’s the thing. At this point, I had already come to grips with the fact that this group project was going to be a Patty project. Ms. Lanford told us at the very beginning that there would be one grade given, so everybody had to do a fair share. But how in the world was I supposed to tell the T(a/e)ylors to get it together? How was I supposed to say, Yo, I ain’t doing all the work? I guess I could’ve just said it like that, but I didn’t want no static. I didn’t want to be on nobody’s bad side, especially since I wasn’t even really on nobody’s good side yet. Matter of fact, I wasn’t on nobody’s side, period.
Man, I missed Cotton.
I know that’s such a random thought, but in moments like these, I missed her bad. And what made it worse was that I couldn’t even talk to her, because Barnaby Middle was on spring break like everybody else—Chester’s was the next week—and her grandma took her on their annual cruise trip, which Cotton don’t even like because she says she don’t do nothing but sit around with no cell phone service, eating shrimp all day and looking out at all the water she can’t swim in while her granny plays slot machines. But if Cotton was here, if she was in this group with me, she would’ve just made up all types of silly stories. Oh, Frida? She was the first woman in Mexico to go to the NFL. Oh, Frida? She invented the flute. Used to play with James Brown and them. Oh, Frida? She’s the first woman to have a day named after her—Friday. By the way, Thursday was named after Thurgood Marshall. That’s Cotton. She would’ve turned everything into a joke until T-N-T realized it wasn’t. That none of this was. That this was about a . . . number . . . grade. A four. I needed a four. Even if that meant I had to do three other people’s work to get it.
I pulled out my notebook and started running down more facts about Frida, filling in some of Becca’s holes. “She also went to one of the top schools in Mexico. It was probably like this one.” Becca nodded. She was in. The other two were still holding out. I tried one more time to make a connection. “And that’s where she met Diego Rivera, who at the time was painting a mural in the school auditorium.”
“That’s the fat man, right?” Becca interjected, excited to share more of what she must’ve seen in the movie. But it came off kinda mean, so she added, “I mean . . . I didn’t mean it like that. But that’s him, right?”
“Right. And what’s really interesting is she ended up marrying him once she healed from the accident. Not right away, but a few years after.”
“The fat man,” TeeTee chimed in, just to confirm that we were still talking about the same Diego. “What did he look like?”
Becca sifted through the papers until finding one with his picture, and stabbed his face with her finger. “Him.”
“Him? She could’ve done better than him. And he looks so old,” Taylor scoffed.
“He was old. Twenty years older,” I explained. Taylor leaned forward, the drama of that kind of relationship seeming to send some kind of electrical charge through her. Suddenly, Frida was a little more interesting.
TeeTee pinched the corner of a picture of Frida, the one where her neck is too long and a small monkey’s looking over her shoulder, and turned the picture around.
“I mean, she wasn’t like . . . she definitely coulda done better than that guy,” she said, studying Frida’s face.
“Yeah, I agree. But he was a genius with a paintbrush, and I guess that’s why she chose him. People used to call their relationship ‘the Elephant and the Dove.’?”