In the last two years I had convinced every cute boy in my grade to show me their thing behind a park bench during recreation.
My mind drifted to the question of their thing for a moment. The American boys’ all looked like a little pale mushroom, while the French boys’ looked like a garlic clove before you peeled it. For a while I’d believed that it had to do with where you were born (my brother was born in France and had a garlic clove, whereas my father was born in America and had a mushroom). But then I discovered one American boy born in America who had a garlic clove instead of a mushroom, and my theory was shattered. I still contemplated asking my father to explain, but hadn’t quite figured out how to ask him so that it wouldn’t sound like I’d seen more than two.
My thoughts went back to my teachers and to the nasty underhanded comments they had been throwing in my direction since the first day of school: “Apparently your vacation hasn’t calmed you down;” or, “Always as disruptive, I see.” My new math teacher even said, “You aren’t stupid—why do you insist on pretending you are?”
How did they know if I was stupid or not?
It wasn’t fair. They never picked on the other dummies in the same way.
In math, certainly, I really was stupid. Even the most simple problems baffled me, and then last year they’d made things impossible by introducing division. Feeling frustrated and victimized, I’d given up listening to the teacher and taken to tickling my best friend Sally Sutherland, who sat next to me. In my lassitude I also wrote love notes in French to Paul Frankel, a boy with fantastically dark eyes who happened to sit at the next desk. “Paul, if you kiss me after class, I will give you my Pez candies,” I would write. He always wanted to know what Disney character I had as my Pez container and what flavor Pez I’d brought that day. He’d promise to kiss me in writing, I’d pass him my Pezes under the desk, and then afterward, in the hallway, sometimes he’d kiss me and sometimes he’d yank up my skirt.
I thought about Sally, how good she was. She never wrote notes to boys, always did her homework, and no one ever yanked up her skirt. My heart constricted painfully. It was a feeling of longing mingled with acute jealousy. This year I was in the dummy class 7 ème C, while Sally had stayed in 7 ème A. Finally free of me, she was making a whole new batch of friends. I had never realized how much I depended on her, my quiet, funny, good-natured, sensible friend—or that she was my only friend—because it hadn’t mattered up until now. The whole thing made me want to cry.
Sitting alone on the bus, I realized that although I hated the school and it hated me, I was used to it and was too much of a coward to change. I’d heard that in a French lycée, the teachers had a right to beat you, and you couldn’t go to the bathroom during class. And there wouldn’t be any Americans. But then in a strictly American school like the one my brother went to there would be no French kids, and I would seem so French that the other kids would hate me anyway.
No, the École Internationale Bilingue was the only school for me because almost all the kids were some kind of half-and-half. In that sense, I was no weirder than others.
By the end of that first week in 7 ème C, I’d found that everyone had settled into distinct groups, and I was clearly being excluded, along with Frédérique Charpentier and Francis Fortescue, who were the weirdest kids I’d ever seen in my life.
Frédérique’s parents were dead and she was being raised by her grandmother. Either because her grandmother didn’t know any better or because Frédérique was emulating her, she dressed and acted like an old lady. She wore galoshes and knitted shawls, and her long blond braids were tied up around her head, which was shaped like a heart. She made silly granny-chuckles and wiped at her eyes with a lace hankie, walked
Kit Tunstall, R.E. Saxton