Also, she regularly reminded herself, there were lots of girls who were way less popular than she was. The girls at the very bottom—like the bottom 10 percent—were staying at the very bottom, because they were there for a real and universally agreed upon reason, drugged out, silent, or just hopelessly weird. But then there were the girls who made up the huge middle—the lower-middle and the middle-middle and the higher-middle. This was 80 percent of the eighth grade class, which at their school meant about a hundred girls, and the movement within this middle group seemed to shift daily, sometimes hourly. And then of course there were the popular girls, the top 10 percent—Lisa and Abby and Becca and Amanda and the rest.
On this day, Wednesday the eighth of October, Meredith and Jules and Kristy were on the high end of the middle-middle. They had been friends for years, had stepped and been stepped on, turned and been turned on, but their friendship remained intact, despite Jules’s wandering eye and Kristy’s increasing, sometimes socially debilitating, shyness.
Meredith did not know exactly what she herself aspired to, socially. She only knew that she aspired.
?
Today was Wednesday, which meant the day started with social studies. (“Our whole freaking lives are social studies,” Jules liked to say.) The class was made tolerable almost entirely by the presence of Steven Overbeck, who sat directly behind her and sometimes whispered passages from the earnest social studies textbook in funny accents. For some reason, and it wasn’t only because he was cute, she found this hilarious, and it was always a trial, but a happy trial, to get through the class without bursting out laughing. “And zen,” Steven whispered, “zee Haitian family must take zere clothes down to zee rivah.” Steven, who had only moved to the school a year before, did other things to make her laugh. Her favorite was when he drew elaborate watches on his wrists with his blue Bic pen. Sometimes the watches were fancy and sometimes plain, sometimes studded with jewels and sometimes children’s watches with cartoon characters’ arms pointing to the numbers. Once he drew a watch that was broken, the springs jutting from the face, the numbers scattered across his arm. She thought Steven Overbeck was probably a genius.
Today the teacher was called away in the middle of the lesson and the room predictably erupted into chaos a split second after her departure. Steven asked if he could draw a watch on her wrist.
“Um, sure,” she said, before realizing this would mean he actually had to touch her wrist—but too late, he was already scooting his chair around to the side of her desk. With his blue Bic pen he lightly drew a circle on the top of her wrist and she broke out in goose bumps on both arms. She prayed he did not notice.
“Time is it?” he asked.
She looked up at the clock. “Eight forty-five.”
“No,” he said. “What time is it on this watch? Just pick a time. But choose wisely.”
She smiled. Her face felt weird, a little numb, and she hoped it didn’t look weird. “Why choose wisely?”
“Because it’s going to be that time all day,” he said. His blond bangs sprouted up in a way that looked intentional—a little boy-band-ish, even—but which she knew was totally accidental, probably the result of a fitful sleep. This added to his appeal.
“Um. Two fifteen.”
“Okay. Be sure to look at it exactly at two fifteen,” he said. He drew the straps and then, with only the tips of his fingers, turned her hand over and drew the buckle on the back of her wrist.
“Nice,” she said. Her heart was hammering, and it continued to hammer throughout the library period. The library period was a fake period during the day, as far as she could tell, that allowed teachers to go to the teachers’ lounge and drink Red Bull. Otherwise she wasn’t sure what the point was. It was like study hall but with no help. It was like reading practice, so the school could announce to the community that it embraced reading.
“What is that?” Kristy asked at the circular library table, leaning halfway over Meredith to get a better look, Kleenex still anchored in place. It was Kristy who suffered the most, who was sick with worry half the time. Kristy didn’t even like to pee at school. What if someone heard? What if someone said something about the sound her pee made hitting the toilet water? These were the things that weighed on her.
“Nothing,” Meredith said. “I mean, just—”
“Did you draw that?”
“Steven did.”
Kristy raised her eyebrows. “Oh, reeeeeally?”
“Stop,” Meredith said, hoping she wouldn’t.
“So is this official?”
“Stop! It’s a picture of a watch.”
“Which he drew on you,” Kristy said.
An hour later, at lunch, Jules swung in beside her.
“Did you hear?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “Did I?”
“Becca Nichols’s sister is pregnant.”
“Whoa,” Meredith said.
“She’s sixteen. And she’s going to have it. Sixteen. SIXteen.”
Jules spit a piece of gum into her hand and then stuck it on the bottom of the cafeteria table. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “About the gum.”
“It’s okay,” Meredith said.
“So Becca’s, like, going to be an aunt.”
“That’s weird,” Meredith said.
“Like hoe, like hoe,” Jules said. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks Becca gets pregnant before she’s sixteen. Can you even imagine? We’ll be going off to college and she’ll, like, have a three-year-old.”
“A girl got pregnant in middle school four years ago,” Meredith said. “She was in Evan’s class. Her name was Kelly something. They were in eighth grade. She was our age.”
“That’s so gross,” Jules said. “Oh my god, I don’t even want to think about it. Tampons gross me out.”
“I know,” Meredith said.
Kristy sat down. “What’s gross?”
“Everything,” Jules said. “Life.”
“Did you see her wrist?” Kristy asked. She grabbed Meredith’s wrist and turned it for Jules to see. “Steven’s mark of ownership.”
“Don’t get pregnant,” Jules said. “Do not get pregnant.”
In English they were reading All Quiet on the Western Front, which Meredith understood was supposed to be very sad, but was mostly only very boring. When she told Evan she was reading it, he said, “Spoiler alert: he dies,” so now she actually liked the book more because at least there was that to look forward to—which sounded bad, but was only to say that at least she knew something was going to happen, that all the reading wasn’t just going to be for nothing.
Meredith hated gym more than any other class because she did not like changing with the other girls in the locker room. She would have changed in the bathroom stalls if she could—this was what she did in the summer, at the local pool—but that was not allowed in the school gym locker room. She had tried it once in sixth grade, she and Kristy both, and the gym teacher had come through and shouted at them that the bathroom stalls were not for dressing out, that they were big girls now and could change with everybody else.