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Chapter One
I once read that in some primitive tribe or other, they punished people by ignoring them. If you were being punished, nobody would talk to you. They'd look through you, they'd pretend you didn't exist. It wouldn't take long for this treatment to kill you. I mean, you'd actually die. Dead.
I didn't die, but for the first nine months of eighth grade I almost wished I had. Before then, I had not one but two best friends, Tracy and Freda. We'd been friends since kindergarten. But then Tracy moved to Connecticut, and Freda's parents got mad at Claverford. They said the teachers weren't developmentally aware enough. They sent Freda to a boarding school even though we had only one more year to go before high school.
At first I wasn't worried. I figured I'd make more friends at school. But it turned out making new friends wasn't easy–or even possible. Cliques had already been established, and I couldn't break in. Or maybe I didn't have the knack of showing people that I was okay. Fun. Nice, even.
At first, the other kids weren't out-and-out mean. They let me sit with them at lunch–but nobody talked to me. If I had to call somebody about homework, whoever it was would answer my questions–the same way you take messages for your parents–bored, but vaguely polite.
Then, in November, it got worse. Much worse. Ms. Hannah, my teacher for homeroom and language arts, told us to write two pages on our "secret lives."
"This is the creative in creative writing, children." Ms. Hannah was the only teacher who still called us"children." She also pronounced "blue" as b-l-y-e-w.
I wrote seven pages pretending to be my Airedale, Reggie. I could have written a hundred pages. I love animals, I love dogs, and I especially love Reggie.
I wrote about dog happiness, about what dog dreams were like, about how it felt to chase a squirrel, about my favorite flavor of dog biscuit, and about my feud with the German shepherd who lived across the hall. But that's not what got me in trouble when Ms. Hannah read my report out loud.
She started out by saying she wanted us to hear the best example of "point of view" she'd ever come across in a student's writing. I relaxed in my chair, waiting to hear yet another piece by Daphne, who was adored by Ms. Hannah and avoided by everyone on our side of the teacher's desk.
"Wilma is to be congratulated on her exemplary effort, which you shall now hear."
I wished I could vaporize and reassemble in a middle school in Moscow. If I had thought anyone else would hear my paper, I would have written the kind of thing everybody else wrote, like my secret life as a music video star, or my secret life as a pro basketball player.
The awful part began halfway down the first page, when Ms. Hannah read, "'I hear the elevator door open. It is my beloved Wilma coming home from school.'" And then–even worse–"'My beloved Wilma is asleep. From the foot of the bed, I watch her. She is so beautiful.'"
Everybody was laughing so hard that Ms. Hannah had to wait five minutes before she could continue. Was she going to read all seven pages? I could survive what she'd read so far, but not if she kept going.
She kept going. "'I see Celeste, the dalmatian who is my best friend after my beloved Wilma. She is peeing. I rush to smell her pee. Celeste had chicken for dinner. I lift my leg over her pee.'"
The class howled. Timothy stamped his feet. BeeBee moaned that she had to pee. They all looked at me and looked away again laughing harder than ever. It took Ms. Hannah five more minutes to get them to quiet down. I wished they never would. I knew what came next.
"'Then I sniff her anus. It smells rich and full of Celeste.'"
After that, Ms. Hannah lost control of the class.
From that day on nobody talked to me, except for the occasional woof or snuffling noise as I walked through the halls–and that wasn't conversation. I was left strictly alone, with only three exceptions.
The first exception was Jared, who sat next to me in language arts. He told me he liked my secret life. He said it made him understand dogs better than he had before. I was glad to hear it, but I wasn't interested in Jared Fein, whose eyebrows met over his nose, forming one long continuous eyebrow.
The second exception was Ardis Lundy, the most popular girl at Claverford. She had Ms. Hannah for sixth period, and Ms. Hannah had been kind enough to read my secret life there, too.
"I'm glad she didn't read mine," Ardis told me. "I pretended I was my grandmother, raising my mother. It was pretty personal." And she smiled at me.
After that, she'd smile and wave when she saw me, but then again, she smiled and waved to everybody.
The third exception was Suzanne Russo. Razor Mouth Suzanne Russo. From then on she'd call me "beloved Wilma," or ask me what I'd sniffed lately or if there were any good fire hydrants near school. And no matter what else she said, she'd always drag the word "anus" in somehow.
Then, two weeks after The Reading, I got a lucky break. Mr. Pashkin, our communications teacher, paired everyone off for debates, and he paired me with BeeBee Molzen, who was very popular. Our topic was human cloning, and we were supposed to work together on our arguments before we debated in front of everybody. I thought this could be my chance to make a new friend, and then to make even more friends if BeeBee brought me into her clique.
The Wish. Copyright © by Gail Levine. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
