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Overview
With beautifully drawn characters and vivid details, this incisive novel portrays middle school in all its complexity—both the promise of what is to come and the pain of what must be left behind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547550176 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2011 |
| Pages: | 204 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Lexile: | 670L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 10 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SARAH FRANKLIN had been best friends with Marjorie Fingerhut for eight years. Sarah couldn't imagine life without Marjorie. Marjorie made her laugh. Marjorie didn't make a big deal out of how Sarah was picky about food and had to eat the carrots before the celery. Marjorie knew how Sarah felt without Sarah's having to tell her. Somehow, magically, Marjorie always just knew. It made the bad parts of seventh grade seem less bad when Sarah thought about how at least she and Marjorie had each other.
Which made the problem Sarah was having especially hard.
They had met in preschool, when Sarah kept noticing Marjorie, who repeatedly told everyone at show-and-tell that she was a leprechaun. But it was inkindergarten, when they were five, that Sarah had really come to understand how it was with her and Marjorie. They were coloring at the Fingerhuts' kitchen table. The air around them smelled of the peanut butter from their sandwiches.
"It's fun being best friends," Marjorie had said. She was concentrating on her drawing and not looking at Sarah when she said it.
"It's really fun," Sarah had said. It felt as though her heart had exploded and little pieces of confetti-happiness were raining down over her insides.
"We should be best friends forever," Marjorie said.
"We should promise," Sarah said. Solemnly she added, "I promise to be best friends with you forever."
"I promise to be best friends with you forever," Marjorie said, giggling.
Sarah giggled, too, because it was fun, and also because Marjorie's always needing to repeat everything in a loud voice was one of the things that made her Marjorie, one of the things that Sarah loved.
Now, remembering that afternoon filled Sarah with a longing that was both piercing and inexplicable, and a little bit like dread.
In most ways, Sarah was happy to be in seventh grade. There were no little kids running around at recess, no lining up to come in from lunch, no Mr. Wheatley for PE. Everyone got five different teachers, so even if you got Mrs. Fogelson for math, it didn't matter, because you only had to sit there for fifty minutes. Then you got to go to another classroom with another teacher, who maybe wasn't perfect but was definitely better than Mrs. Fogelson, who had nose hairs.
After a year of stressful self-consciousness in sixth grade, Sarah had grown to like the way she looked. Her blond hair had darkened in the past year or two: now it was honey-colored, almost but not quite brown. It came to just above her shoulders; she parted it in the middle and blow-dried it straight every other morning. She liked her hair in the same way that she liked her eyes (hazel, with dark lashes) and her nose (not too big, lightly freckled) and her feet (small, with a prominent second toe, which she had once read was a sign of intelligence). She wasn't too crazy about her invisible cheekbones, the mole on her shoulder, or the fact that she hadn't gotten any taller since fifth grade. But overall, she was pretty satisfied.
Another good thing about seventh grade was chorus. In fifth grade, kids could only take band. Ms. Washington let them pick any instrument they wanted and made them switch only if there were too many flutes or not enough French horns. They gave a concert in the spring. From the clarinet section, Sarah thought they sounded horrible, but Dad and his new wife, Diane, said they were good. Mom didn't come. She still didn't like going places where she might run into Diane.
Sarah switched from band to chorus in sixth grade. It was so much better. Even if they sometimes sang out of tune, at least it sounded like singing. Band sounded like sick animals. Sarah loved standing in a semicircle around Mr. Roche, watching his hands to help her keep the time, trying to remember about posture and not tapping her foot and not singing through her nose. There was a lot to remember, but Sarah didn't mind. She loved "Shenandoah" and "Amazing Grace" and "She Walks in Beauty." "All Star" by Smash Mouth gave her goose bumps, even though Mr. Roche put it in the repertoire just to keep the boys interested.
Marjorie didn't switch to chorus. She kept playing bassoon in the seventh grade band, along with Dennis Veitch, who had been taking private lessons since second grade and was first chair. Marjorie didn't mind. She played louder than Dennis until the band director had to make everyone else stop and tell Marjorie to "pipe down." Everyone would laugh, but it never bothered Marjorie.
Nothing ever bothered Marjorie.
Which was part of the problem.
In seventh grade chorus, Sarah mostly hung out with Lizzie Lowitz, who had gone to a different elementary school. Sarah really liked Lizzie. She had long, black, frizzy hair and was totally boy crazy. When Mr. Roche gave the altos a break, Sarah and Lizzie would sit in the corner and talk about the boys in the class. "He is so cute," Lizzie would say about everyone, except Jason Webb, who already had a beard. "That hair on his face is gross. It has food in it," she would whisper. "We hate him." And even though Sarah didn't hate Jason — didn't even know him — she would laugh, because it was fun to gossip, to talk about things that she never talked about with Marjorie, who was still wearing shirts with cartoon characters on them and didn't seem to know that boys were even alive.
Even though she had a lot of fun with Lizzie, when the lunch bell rang, Sarah headed over to the far side of the school, where Marjorie had staked out a bench under a lone palm tree. They liked sitting there: they could see what everyone was doing, but they were far enough away that no one bothered them. They talked about who said dumb things in class and wondered what their teachers did in their own houses after school. They laughed at Mrs. Gretch, who was both the assistant principal and the special skills teacher, because during all the breaks she went out to her car and smoked with the windows up. When she got out of the car, smoke poured out behind her, as if she'd started a campfire in there.
They talked about their families. They told old jokes. They remembered things. There was a lot to remember, after eight years. Sarah always remembered that Marjorie was the girl in preschool with magic shoes that made her fast, the girl who saw fairies and sprinkled crushed-up barbecue potato chips onto her peanut butter sandwich. And how in third grade Marjorie was the girl who wore Tweety Bird T-shirts and purple stretch pants three days in a row, even after Alison Mulvaney said cartoon characters were babyish, even Bart Simpson.
Some things Sarah remembered and didn't talk about. How Marjorie never seemed to notice when other kids made fun of her lazy eye. How it was Marjorie who invited Sarah over after school every day for a month when Sarah's dad moved out. And how, around Christmas last year, when Grandpa had to have his right leg amputated, Marjorie knew without being told that Sarah was really afraid of seeing his stump. Sarah never had to say. Marjorie just knew.
"Mrs. Gretch is not pwetty," Marjorie still said sometimes, using her Tweety Bird voice, and Sarah giggled, because it was still funny when she did it. But secretly she was glad they were sitting on the faraway bench, that no one else was around to hear.
Marjorie's favorite class was video production. Each kid got to learn how to make movies, and Marjorie loved movies. She knew most of the lines from Star Wars by heart. She had seen The Matrix Reloaded fifteen times and Alien vs. Predator eighteen times. Also, she watched old movies on TV when her parents thought she was asleep. Science fiction movies were her favorite, but she would watch anything in black-and-white: westerns and musicals and just plain old stories with men wearing hats and talking in a way that real people never talked. Sometimes when Sarah spent the night, they would sneak down to the family room and turn on the TV just to see what was on. Marjorie knew the names of all the old movie stars and which ones had won Oscars and how many times they'd been married.
"How do you know all this stuff?" Sarah asked her once as they lay on the floor on their stomachs, on big pillows that they'd pulled off the couch. The room was dark except for the flickery blue light of the TV. The clock on the DVD player said it was 3:31 in the morning.
"I read books," Marjorie said. "And my grandma knows all about old movies. She watched them when they weren't old."
Grandma Fingerhut lived in Ohio, but she came out to the Bay Area for Christmas and birthdays. Sarah was a little afraid of her because she was always asking questions to find out if Sarah had gotten her period yet. But she was Marjorie's favorite relative except for her parents. They talked like friends, not like a kid and an old person.
"Grandma says she would have been a director if they'd let women do that in the old days," Marjorie said. "She says I'm lucky I don't have to work in a school cafeteria."
"Do you want to be a director?" Sarah asked.
Marjorie nodded. "Or maybe a sound editor."
"What's a sound editor?"
"The person who figures out what music goes with what scene. It makes a huge difference in the movie. Think about what Star Wars would be like without the music."
Sarah tried to imagine.
"I never thought of that," she said. "I never thought of the music as something separate."
"That's because the sound editor did a good job."
On the TV, a man and woman in fancy clothes danced to an old-fashioned love song in a garden. They were singing the words to the song and they weren't even out of breath. Marjorie was mouthing the words along with them.
"You'd be a good sound editor," Sarah said. She was impressed that Marjorie had thought of such an unusual job. Most kids wanted to be doctors or lawyers or soccer players.
"What do you want to be?" Marjorie asked.
"I don't know yet."
"If you could be anything. If you could wave a magic wand and just be something."
"Maybe a singer. If I get better."
It wasn't true, but Sarah was too embarrassed to say what she really wanted to be.
Marjorie knew she was lying.
"What else?" she asked.
After a minute Sarah said, "It's not very glamorous."
Marjorie shrugged, not taking her eyes off the dancing couple.
"It probably doesn't pay very much," Sarah said.
"So?"
"My mom says I should try to make a lot of money. She says you shouldn't let someone else support you. She says you never know."
"Yeah, but Sarah, you have to be happy."
"Well, maybe I can be happy making a lot of money."
"Yeah." Marjorie was quiet for a few minutes. Then she asked, "What's the other job, anyway?"
Sarah waited until the music was over and the dancing lady's floaty dress had stopped swirling.
"You know when my grandpa had his leg amputated and he had to go to physical therapy? Well, there were all these people who helped him do exercises so he could walk on his fake leg. And so his other muscles were strong." She paused. "I might like to help people like that."
Suddenly she felt shy.
"Is it like PE?" Marjorie asked. "Because you hate PE."
"No. I don't have to do the exercises. I just have to help other people do them." On TV, the dancing couple were having a fight, but you could tell they would make up, that they really loved each other. "I think I might like helping people," Sarah said.
Without taking her eyes off the screen, Marjorie said, "I think you'd be really good at that."
They watched the movie in silence. Sarah felt happy, the way you did when you told somebody something important and she didn't laugh.
When the couple finally kissed, Marjorie said, "See, if I'd directed this movie, there'd have been a big blue space alien in it. With eyestalks."
"It would have been better that way," Sarah said, just to be nice.
Marjorie nodded. "That's what I think, too," she said.
A week later, at lunch, Alison and Zannie Pierce and Yvonne Brondello approached Sarah and Marjorie's palm tree. As they came closer and closer, Sarah felt her heart begin to pound. Alison practically ran the school. There was no reason for her to want to talk to them.
"You guys have to move," Alison said, looking down at them as if they were something that had gotten stuck on her shoe. "This bench is too big for just two people."
"You can sit here," Marjorie said, picking up her lunch bag and scrunching closer to the edge of the bench. "There's room."
"What smells?" Yvonne said, crinkling up her nose. "It smells gross over here."
"Her lunch," Zannie said, pointing. "She still eats gross things."
Yvonne, whose mother ran Mama Brondello's Cooking with Love Catering Service, looked disgusted. "You shouldn't eat egg salad. It goes bad in the heat," she said. "Doesn't your mom know about not making sandwiches with mayonnaise?"
"My dad makes my lunch," Marjorie said.
Alison, Zannie, and Yvonne all giggled in a nasty way. Zannie whispered something to Yvonne, who laughed out loud.
Alison turned back to Marjorie. "You need to move," she said.
"We were here first," Sarah said. She could hear the shaking in her voice.
"In about ten seconds, all the leadership people are going to get here. And there isn't enough room for all of us." Alison put her hands on her hips, which — Sarah couldn't help but notice — had begun to look like an adult's. "Do you really want to explain to them how you were here first?"
The leadership people were all the kids who were elected to school offices. There was a president, a few vice presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer. Each class also had a representative. They had a lot of meetings and decided things like whether you should have to get dressed up for the eighth grade dances or could just go in jeans. Alison was the seventh grade rep.
"Why do you have to sit in our place?" Sarah asked. She glanced over at Marjorie, wishing she would say something, but Marjorie just smiled fiercely, the way she did when someone was being mean.
Alison sighed. "I don't want to have to explain everything," she said. "Just move."
"And fast," Yvonne said. "That egg salad smell is making me sick."
Sarah and Marjorie gathered up their lunches and their backpacks. Sarah really wished Marjorie's didn't have decals that read SCIENCE FICTION RULES and BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY plastered all over it. She could feel the other girls' nasty stares even without looking at their faces.
Standing up, she faced Alison. "This is still our place. We're eating here tomorrow, no matter what you say."
Alison opened her mouth as if to speak. Sarah braced herself but was surprised when Alison closed her mouth and gave a small, smug smile, then shrugged her shoulders, as though Sarah could say whatever she wanted, but it was obvious who had the power, who had ended up with the bench.
"Marjorie," Sarah said as they ventured out onto the hot, crowded playground, "you shouldn't be so nice about letting them sit with us when they were so mean."
"Why?"
Sarah sighed. The way Marjorie didn't get things could be frustrating.
"Because sometimes, the nicer you are, the meaner they are. Don't you get that?" She scanned the schoolyard, trying to find an empty bench. "No wonder they wanted our place. Everything else is taken."
"We can sit on the edge of the soccer field," Marjorie said.
The only kids who hung out that far from the classrooms were the kids with no friends, either because they'd just moved to the school or didn't speak English or did really weird things like pick their noses or walk down the halls talking to themselves.
"I don't think we should sit out there," Sarah said.
"Why?"
It was hard to explain this kind of thing to Marjorie. The unwritten rules that everyone else understood without batting an eye just didn't make sense to her. She was always asking "Why?" or "So what?" Sometimes it felt to Sarah as though Marjorie really was a space alien who'd gotten lost in the universe and was beamed down to the wrong planet.
Marjorie pushed at her glasses, which were sliding down her nose. "Come on," she said. "It's hot, and I'm still hungry!"
Sarah trudged along behind her, sure that every kid on the playground was watching them make their way across the soccer field. She decided that she wasn't ever doing this again, that even if Alison pointed a gun at her, she wasn't getting up from their bench.
The sun was hot, but she was even hotter, and it wasn't the weather. It came from misery, from embarrassment, from having been sent away, from having nowhere else to go. Ahead of her, Marjorie walked on, completely oblivious.
It occurred to Sarah that if it weren't for her, Marjorie might be the kind of kid who ate all her lunches out on the edge of the soccer field.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Hard Kind of Promise"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Gina Willner-Pardo.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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