Totally Middle School Read online

  “Stop it. Stop it. This is what comes from too much Civil War on Netflix. You don’t even know if Alabama has a dear old bayou or a…a dear old…fjord. Or a bat cave. Or a divided highway. This is important, Midge.”

  The seated girl put down her invisible thread and the nonexistent embroidery hoop upon which she’d been pretending to stitch an improving sentiment, probably a Bible verse. “Sister, you are uncommonly, um, good at ruining the mood of an Alabama evening.”

  “It’s half past eight in the morning. Midge, wait’ll your sick noggin gets a load of this. I just heard Grandma yammering on the phone with one of her bingo friends.”

  Grandma Flynn was hard of hearing, so when she used the telephone, she talked loudly. No such thing as a secret when it came to Grandma Flynn. “Why, whatever did that sweet old lady let slip out of her sainted lips?”

  “Margaret Mary, I’m about to smack you.” Bridget Flynn folded her arms and glared at her twin sister. “If you don’t drop the Southern belle act, I’ll just keep the news to myself.”

  Margaret Mary sighed and fanned herself with an invisible something or other. “Shall we take a stroll in this balmy evening and perhaps partake of a mint julep?”

  “You thinking a Coolatta at Dunks? Sure.” Sometimes getting Margaret Mary out of the house could jostle her into being slightly more normal.

  Margaret Mary, who styled herself Hannabelle Lee, tried to link her arm with that of her twin as they set out to take the air. Bridget, who refused to be Beulah Mae to her sister’s loopy alter ego, pulled away, saying, “Don’t take your airs out on the street, Midge. That’s the rule.” Dunkin’ Donuts was only around the corner, past Budget Tires and the dollar store, but after four minutes on the public sidewalks, people might stare. It had happened before.

  “My, my. Oh, dearest sister, industry is surely a-flourishing in the Old South,” said Margaret Mary as a rusty truck with Massachusetts plates tried to back up into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking area, got stuck, and stopped cold. Perhaps the driver was considering abandoning the vehicle and just running away. As they paused to make sure they didn’t get run over while the driver made up his mind, the girls could see Grandma Flynn. She had stumped onto their back porch and was hauling the laundry off the line. Though it was halfway through April, the weather forecasters were calling for possible snow by afternoon. The buds looked as if they were ready to keel over from the fear of a late frost. No stamina. So much for your balmy Alabama evening.

  Bridget demanded, “Are you ready to listen?”

  Margaret Mary, known to her classmates as Midge Flynn but to herself as Hannabelle Lee Robespierre, seemed a little pale. Going from a story person back to her real self took a while; she had to gulp a couple of times. She went faint, either actual or pretend. It was hard to tell. A Coolatta usually helped. “Yes, I suppose so, darlin’. Though I’m feeling mighty poorly at present.”

  They pushed on through. It was the Friday morning of school vacation week. The other people in Dunks were two small women hunched at a table in the corner and several old guys in baseball hats and nylon windcheaters. The fellows all had yellow-white hair and big bellies and loud voices. Their New England accents were anything but Alabamian. Each man sat at a different small table with his legs spread out, but the guys were all talking as if they were in some club together. It was mostly about car repair, though Bridget noticed there was only one car in the lot. These grandpas looked as if they were beyond driving, or couldn’t afford the insurance. But okay, thought Bridget—their noise will drown out any drama that Midge might start.

  Midge and Bridget got their drinks. Bridget paid. Midge sipped with great delicacy while Bridget slurped. They didn’t talk for a while, just listened. The timid women in the corner were wordless, staring into their Styrofoam coffee cups. The geezers were talking at each other without really listening. (The way Midge did when she was being Hannabelle Lee.)

  “I bring my car to Toyota? Oil change, seventy-eight dollars. I bring it over here? They charge you fifteen bucks to rotate your tires.”

  “There’s a guy in Newry, he comes to your house, does it in half an hour.”

  “I got a guy in Rottsberg, does my brakes, costs me eighty, eighty-five tops.”

  “Yeah, Barry give you the same discount he git. I come out one morning, what the hell. Truck don’t start. Battery kaput. ‘What year is that junker?’ he says. I tell him. Within forty-five minutes he there, man.”

  One of the old guys got up and left without saying goodbye. He had a limp and a cane. None of his buddies seemed to notice his departure. All this plate glass around boxy Dunks, all this wan, pre-storm light picking people out like specimens. The place was like a holding tank.

  “I had a dead battery in the Ford, call up the guy. Comes full down the driveway, put those clamper things on—thirty-five bucks. I tell ya.”

  “Bridget?” Midge had rosier color, and her eyes weren’t so wide-open, which were good signs. “Okay. Down to brass tacks. What’s going on?”

  Bridget Flynn knocked her straw around, making the last slush rustle in the plastic. Sounding like crinolines over tulle at a cotillion ball, maybe? “I heard Grandma on the phone telling someone they already sent out the middle school assignment letters.”

  Margaret Mary put her hands on the edge of the table and folded them together. “Shouldn’t those letters come to us? We’re the students.”

  “Who knows? Listen. It’s bad. They don’t want to send us both to Trenton.” Trenton was the middle school nearer them, just the other side of Target.

  “We’re going to Lapham?” Margaret Mary shrugged. “Oh well. It’s a longer bus ride, but everyone says the cafeteria is better. Not so dirty. Nicer side of town, I guess.”

  “No, you’re not getting it, Midge. One of us is going to Trenton. The other to Lapham. I don’t know who is where, but they’re splitting us up.”

  Margaret Mary looked at Bridget. She didn’t look all brave Scarlett O’Hara, just scared. They had been in school together for six years, eight if you counted preschool. Had sat next to each other, chosen each other for teams, dressed alike even at Halloween. They were so different, but their faces were the same. “But can they do this?”

  “Well, they got two schools, don’t they? Grandma was yelling into the phone that you can’t—what’s the word?—ask for a change. Petition. You can’t petition for a change. The decision about which middle school kids get assigned to is always final.”

  That was how it had been presented to them a month ago by the school superintendent, who had broadcast his message over the murmur of the rising sixth graders in the auditorium. “You’ll find yourselves in middle school with some of your grade-school friends and not with others,” he had told them. “But you’ll all come back together in the town’s single high school, so deal with it.” The applause had been vigorous and ironic, because almost everyone in fifth grade had someone they couldn’t wait to get away from. You could always hope.

  But Bridget and Midge! Midge—otherwise known as Margaret Mary Flynn, at one time Midge the Midget, sometimes Hannabelle Robespierre, less frequently Her Royal Highness Violetta Fiortini, late of the African Alps—Midge and Bridget had never been separated before.

  Separated from each other, that is.

  Separated from their mother, yes. She was in Taos or Denver. Or on the Gulf Coast—there’d been a glossy postcard, maybe of the Mississippi Delta or someplace. A lot of hanging ivy and Greek columns. She was finding herself. Twins had been one child too many; she couldn’t deal.

  Separated from their father, yes (everybody has a father, but he isn’t always accounted for).

  Separated from their grandmother—long-suffering Mrs. Flynn—rarely. Bingo nights were about it. Grandma Flynn was grim but constant about it; you had to give her that.

  But separated from each other? Never.r />
  “What are we going to do?” asked Margaret Mary in an uncommonly small and ordinary voice. She picked up someone else’s crumbs with a wet finger and flicked them onto the floor.

  Fifth graders couldn’t budge a school official on a matter that defeated even parents and guardians. So Bridget shrugged. She didn’t mean for it to come across as loose and casual as it must have looked. Margaret Mary got an expression on her face. Here we go, thought Bridget as Midge started right in.

  “They think, dear sister Beulah Mae, we are going to quail and shrink, but we Alabama women are made of sterner stuff,” said Margaret Mary in her Hannabelle Lee voice.

  “Cut it out,” muttered Bridget. “It doesn’t work in the real world, Midge.”

  From a table two over: “Guy over to Lopers Falls, he’ll forget to bill you the oil change once ya get him talking about the mess in Warshington, D.C. Course the oil he put in is dirtier than what he drain out.”

  Margaret Mary’s voice was rising into that carrying falsetto. “We’ll refuse to be parted. No force in nature can part us. The Union can split, but sisters, never.” She gripped Bridget’s forearm with a rather unladylike claw. “I tell you, sterner stuff, Beulah Mae!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Bridget. “I can finish my Coolatta outside.” She swept Margaret Mary’s empty plastic cup into the bin and they turned toward the door.

  The two birdlike women were trying to leave at the same time. One, Bridget now saw, was a put-upon younger woman with a serene expression. She sported a hairnet and a white jacket with pockets, like a nurse’s aide. With one hand she was holding ajar the door to the vestibule and with her other hand she was encouraging the older woman gently toward the strip of threshold.

  The older woman was dreadfully thin. She held her pipe-cleaner elbows tight to her waist. She wore a funny padded vest where a belt would go; it hung down from straps on her bony shoulders, like a crib bumper repurposed into a weird fashion accessory. Her hair was tortured gray straw, though her body didn’t look so old. Her face was pinched and her feet scuffed and she looked at the floor. “Come on, this is the first one of two, Flossie. You can do it,” said the healthier young woman. “We got in here, didn’t we? We can get out. Lift your foot.”

  With effort, the starved-looking older woman managed to cross the threshold into the vestibule. There wasn’t even a step, just a metal line flush in the floor. Once she’d done that, her other foot dragged along easily enough, and the pair of women made it swiftly to the edge of the second door, the one between the vestibule and the outside world. Some invisible force field intimidated the older lady. Who, Bridget realized, was probably more shattered than old and decrepit.

  Bridget hung back and watched as the Flossie lady struggled to get herself over the second imaginary hurdle. Behind them, Margaret Mary muttered at dangerously increasing volume: “Our own dear Papa, if he was still with us, bless his heart, would take up his firearms to keep us together. Or hire us a tutor from Harvard or Princeton, one of those better Northern establishments. We could continue our learning in the comfort and safety of our own homestead. Genteel and protected. Why must we suffer?”

  “Then there’s the time where they forgit to bill me the timing belt and say it’s my fault. I call the sheriff; I won’t be pestered for repair bills I never get.”

  “Come on, Flossie. You can do this; you’ve had lots of practice today. Upsy-daisy. There we go.”

  Eager to evacuate Midge and her fancies, Bridget had shoved through the first door. Flossie, successfully outside now, shuffled toward the only car in the lot. “Why, dear sister, must we suffer?” bleated Margaret Mary, coming behind. Looking up at the caregiver, who had paused to keep the door open for the girls, Bridget found she couldn’t speak. She just didn’t know the answer to “Why must we suffer?” By the expression on the attendant’s face, neither did she.

  Bridget herself paused at the threshold to the parking lot, and then stepped over it. She held the door for her sister, but she didn’t look back.

  They turned the corner in silence. Shivering with the sharply dropping temperature, Grandma Flynn was planted on the front porch with her arms folded, waiting for them. A look of sour satisfaction toasted her red face. She could hardly wait for them to cross the street. “I got some news for you two, and no mistake,” she bellowed. “I’m just off the line with the assistant superintendent of schools, no less.”

  Margaret Mary stepped off the curb first. Bridget lingered a moment. The truck finally lurching out of the parking lot at Dunks picked up speed and took a turn on two wheels, as if the driver meant to make up for lost time. It must have good clean motor oil in its metal veins and a new timing belt. It missed Margaret Mary entirely. The wind brushed Bridget on the face, but that was all that happened—it spared her, too, by a Confederate whisker.

  Grandma Flynn was still there when the truck disappeared. She didn’t even look anxious. She expected her granddaughters to live, for the love of Pete. She had gone to bat for them, after all. She had attempted something, and her old Irish face couldn’t hide the satisfaction of having fought a good battle. But had she won? And if so, what was the outcome? Had she been arguing that the twins should be kept together?

  Or maybe that they shouldn’t?

  Bridget wanted to stay with her sister and take care of her in the treachery of middle school. At the same time, she hoped the cause was lost, and that they would both have to be on their own at last.

  Bridget was divided in half, twins in more ways than one.

  The sisters still didn’t cross the street. A car was coming. As they waited, the wind off the Alabama bayou pushed the hair away from Margaret Mary’s cheeks and brow. An identical wind, though hailing from central Massachusetts, worked its identical way through Bridget’s hair. The car driven by the nurse’s aide smoothed itself, as if every attempt was being made not to jostle the passenger. Brittle old Flossie sat stoically, looking ahead through the windshield, not able to imagine what difficult thresholds lay ahead, but probably worrying about them already. “Come on,” said Bridget, “wherever we’re going to, let’s go.”

  Gregory Maguire is the author of many books for kids and adults but is best known as the bestselling author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. He was born and raised in a quiet neighborhood in Albany, New York, along with six siblings. His favorite activities were, and still are, writing, drawing, and reading. He was not a big fan of seventh and eighth grades, finding them a lot like elementary school but with rotating classrooms and more homework. However, after graduating from college, he returned to his former seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms as a teacher. During his one year of teaching, he took his students to New York City to see a play and lost them all, which helped him decide that being a middle school teacher was not in the cards for him. A fun fact is that the play they saw was Pippin, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, who, twenty-five years later, would write the music and lyrics for the hit Broadway show Wicked. Gregory and his husband live in Concord, Massachusetts, with their three lively teenagers.

  On my first day of eighth grade at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Junior High School, Donny Lentz got the draft notice that told him to report to some camp down in Louisiana in two weeks. He would train for war for thirty days. After that, he’d be shipped to South Vietnam, where he would serve his country by joining the forces of the United States Army. Congratulations, the draft notice said.

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t expected it. He’d graduated from high school in June and been bagging at the A&P ever since. He said he didn’t want to start college and then have to leave, like his brother had already done.

  I didn’t know him all that well, since he was five years older than me and lived a couple of blocks away. We went to the same church, and if we saw each other there he’d nod or maybe wave or something like that, and then go on to his p
ew and sit a little apart from his parents, like he was leaving space for his missing brother. He was the only one in the church who didn’t carry a Bible in with him, and I think that rankled Pastor Jamieson, since every so often he’d fuss about carrying your own KJV because you didn’t want Jesus coming back and finding you with a crisp, brand-spanking-new Bible at home because that meant you hadn’t been reading it and would you want to show an unread Bible to Jesus?

  It must have been frustrating for him to see Donny walk in Sunday after Sunday, Bible-less. I wondered sometimes if that was why Donny did it.

  I mostly knew Donny because he ran by our house every morning when I was leaving for third grade, then fourth grade, then fifth, sixth, seventh, and now eighth grade. He had this long, loping run, with his head back and his mouth mostly open, his toes pointed to where he was going, his arms low and working like loose pistons. It looked kind of dumb. But his dog made up for it. She was a border collie named Mindy, and she ran down the street like she was running the hills of Scotland, parting the high grass in front of her, searching for lost sheep, her lips pulled back and grinning, her ears back, her mouth open just a little, running beside Donny so easily, every so often looking up at him to be sure he was okay, which he always was. She had two different-colored eyes—one blue and one brown—and when she pricked her ears up, the tip of the left one bent forward.

  Usually Donny would just wave at me and keep on, but sometimes he’d stop, set his hands on his knees, breathe heavy, and ask how I was doing, how was school going, was I running because I looked like I’d be a good runner—stuff like that. Mindy would sit beside him, watching him close, waiting for the least sign that he was ready to go again. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him, even when I rubbed the back of her neck or played with her tipped ear. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him, even if I got down and scratched her chest.