Friction Read online

  For all my teachers

  1

  THE FIRST TIME we all meet Stacy, it’s just a regular morning.

  Our teacher, Simon, is in front of the room, shuffling flash cards. He leans back against the science counter, mixes the deck a couple of times, and hooks one ankle over the other, the way he always does. Then he holds up the first word.

  “Ology,” he says out loud, so we can hear how it sounds. I write, the study of. Things are quiet while pencils scratch, sounding just like gerbils making a nest out of cedar chips and Kleenex. Simon holds up the next one. Astro. On a test he’ll put them together, and we’ll have to figure out that astrology means “the study of stars.”

  “Ichthy,” Simon says. Fish, I write, and then I kick Tim and make a gagging face to remind him how we remember that one: Fish tastes icky. . . . ichthy. But Tim doesn’t kick back, even when I kick him again, and then I notice there’s this massive hush in the room. I look up to see a girl standing in the doorway. The new girl. Simon told us she was coming, but up until this second I’d forgotten all about it.

  She’s got shiny black hair down to her behind and gray eyes that take up her whole face, and she’s as skinny as I am. She’s wearing a purple-and-black turtleneck and jeans that look brand-new, and she grins at everybody like she’s totally psyched to meet us. She’s got a gap between her two front teeth.

  “Hi,” she goes. “I’m Stacy.” I see a flash of silver in her mouth. A tongue ring. “Let’s get this party started.”

  And that’s how it begins.

  2

  SIMON CLOSES HIS eyes, jabs his finger on the class list hanging over the science counter, and lands on Alex. So I get to show Stacy around.

  “How old are you?” is the first thing she asks after Simon leaves us alone.

  “Twelve,” I say. “My birthday’s not until August. But everybody else is thirteen.”

  “Huh.” Stacy raises her black eyebrows. “So you must be really smart.” She’s kind of small, but something about the way she stands definitely seems older.

  “Nah,” I say, walking out of the front classroom into the side hallway to show her the bathrooms and our little kitchen. “I just started school young.”

  “So where’s my class, then?” Stacy asks, walking with me. “Where’s all the fourteen-year-olds?” That must be her age. She must have gotten left back once.

  “This is it,” I say. I stop when we hit the back classroom. Stacy stops with me.

  “After next year we’re done. They don’t teach past ninth grade at Forest Alternative.”

  “Where are all the ninth graders?” she asks, looking around.

  “There aren’t any yet,” I explain. “We’ll be the first ones. Simon will stay our teacher, and then after we leave, he’ll start over with the new sixth graders.”

  “Weird,” Stacy goes. She turns to weave through the classroom tables, and I follow her. When she gets to the glass wall, she leans forward to mush her nose right on it. “What’s this room for?”

  “It’s the silent study room and Simon’s office. You can go online anytime you want in there, only nobody’s allowed to talk, except to Simon. If you do, you lose half an hour of game time on games day.”

  “What’s games day?” Stacy looks through the glass at Simon, who’s leaning over a couple of kids and a geometry book.

  “We just get a break from our regular work. We get to play stuff like Scrabble and chess.” Stacy moves back from the wall, lifts her long hair, and smoothes it across one shoulder so that it spills over onto her front.

  “No offense,” she says, “but this school is freaking weird.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  “When my mom told me each grade has the same teacher all day long here, I thought I’d hate it.” She’s studying Simon. “But not anymore.” She shakes her head, hair fanning out everywhere, all dramatic. “He is a total babe.”

  “Who?” I go. “Simon?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Stacy says, widening her eyes at me and heading for the glass door. “Don’t you think he’s hot?”

  “I guess,” I say, even though I never thought about it before, and then I follow her through the silent study room to the front classroom, where we started. The other kids pretend to concentrate on their work, but I see them checking us out, wondering what she’s like.

  “Where’s he from?” Stacy asks, looking over at Viv.

  “He’s Indian,” I say. “India Indian, not cowboys and.” I’ve known Viv so long, I barely notice his vanilla swirl turban anymore.

  “Wild,” Stacy says, like she’s impressed.

  We pass Tim, who’s asleep over a word problem, with Rate x Time = Distance scrawled on his paper. I snap him on the head, and Stacy grins when he shoots up like a rubber ball bouncing off pavement. I like her smile. That gap between her teeth looks perfect for spitting through. I bet she’s a good aim, when she wants to be. Now she’s tapping her tongue ring on her lower lip and trying not to stare.

  “There’s crippled kids here?” she whispers.

  “That’s Sebastian.” His legs are twisted really bad, so he has to wear braces on them, and his arms end at the elbows, and he falls a lot and has to be helped up. Only you have to do it the way he likes, or else he’ll yell at you, and he can be loud.

  Stacy tucks her tongue back into her mouth. “Jesus,” she whispers again, all serious. “That’s got to suck.”

  “Yeah, but don’t say that to him,” I tell her. “He hates pity.” I pull on her arm. “Come on. Outside is part of the tour.”

  I race out the double doors and hop over the short slate path leading to the lower school. Then I whip down and around the side of our building, dodging a couple of ice patches and leftover winter slush. While Stacy catches up to me at the bottom of the hill near the edge of the woods, I roll the sleeves of my blue sweater down over my hands to keep them warm. Stacy dives after me into the trees, toward the ladder and stream. Old branches snap under our feet, and the air chills the tips of my ears.

  “At recess the girls come down here and build forts and stuff,” I say as we slow to a stop. “I play soccer up on the field with most of the guys.”

  The stream is about four feet wide and trades off being shallow and deep in places, and it always flows fast. There’s an old ladder here, lying across the two banks, making a bridge. Sometimes we all hang out by the ladder, practicing running across on the rungs. Once you get the hang of it, learn how to plant your feet and carry your weight just right, you don’t even have to think. It’s almost as good as juggling a soccer ball one hundred times in a row without messing up. “I want to play professionally when I’m older,” I tell Stacy, running across the ladder, back, and across again. “You know. Like, for a living.”

  We haven’t ever had a real coach with real practices because our school never had extra money for that stuff. But soon it won’t matter. “Next fall Simon’s going to coach us, and we’ll get to compete in the private-school league.” Tim and I can’t wait. We want to be on the same teams all the time and get to travel around the world and maybe try out for the Olympics someday.

  “But girls don’t play in boys’ leagues,” Stacy goes. I run the ladder again, and she watches my feet hit the rungs.

  “There aren’t any girls in the boys’ league right now, but my parents say if I want to and I’m good enough, it’s against the law to keep me off. So I’m just going to practice really hard and not worry about it.”

  I stop in the middle of the ladder, balancing over water on nothing but the balls of my feet and the metal bars. One teeter in either direction, and I could fall. “What about you?” I ask. “What do you want to do?” I hop my way to the opposite bank, surprised that Stacy doesn’t answer right away. She seems like the type of pers
on who has an answer for everything. But she just pulls her hands out of her coat and winds her hair around an arm, over her sleeve. She gets a thick coil from her shoulder to her elbow before she speaks.

  “I want to be powerful and rich,” she says. “But not famous.” She keeps winding, and the coil thins out as it gets near her wrist. “I’ll be in the CIA,” she says. “Nobody can find you that way, unless you want them to.” Stacy smiles a little and heads for the ladder. “Hey”—she slides her right foot onto the right solid edge of the metal and then does the same with her left and the left edge—“is that blond guy your boyfriend?” She glides out a little bit, keeping the edges centered lengthwise under her feet.

  “That’s Tim,” I say. “He’s my best friend.” Stacy makes her way across the ladder to me. “His mom sometimes works at the same clinic as my parents. They’re doctors. She’s a nurse.” Stacy steps carefully onto the bank.

  “What’s his dad do?” she asks. She stands closer to you than most people. I can feel her breath on my face.

  “He runs a taxi service.” I turn to walk along the stream, in the opposite direction from the school building.

  “What kind of doctor is your dad?” Stacy goes. I grab a couple of small rocks from the ground and start chucking them across the stream. I’m not aiming at any one thing, but I keep hitting the same branch anyway.

  “Psychiatrist,” I say. “You know. He talks to people about their problems and gives them medicine to not be depressed and things like that.”

  Stacy throws a couple of rocks too before we turn around to head back. We’re quiet for awhile, so all we hear is the grinding of our feet on cold ground and the spilling sound of the stream. Just when we can see the ladder again, Stacy goes, “My father’s dead.”

  I stop in my tracks. She steps close, the tips of her shoes practically touching mine. Her voice gets low, and she looks me straight in the eye.

  “He was in a car wreck,” she says. “He would have been okay, but the thing is, we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we can’t have blood transfusions because they interfere with the will of the Lord.” At first I think she might be kidding, because nothing about her seems like she could talk about the “will of the Lord” in such a serious way. But who would joke about their father being dead? I know what transfusions are. That’s when you’ve bled so much that the hospital has to give you other blood that goes from plastic bags through tubes into your veins.

  “What’s a Jehovah’s Witness?” I ask, but it comes out all wrong, like I’m starting to tell a joke or something.

  “It’s a religion,” Stacy says. “It has a lot of rules. Like you can’t celebrate birthdays or Halloween. There’s all this stuff about what you can and can’t do, especially if you’re sick or hurt or something.”

  “It doesn’t seem very fair,” I go. Then I bite my lip. It’s bad enough her father died. I shouldn’t make it worse by insulting her religion.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” she goes.

  “Why not?”

  She shrugs and kicks at the ground. A rock loosens under her sneaker and rolls away, leaving a small hole in the icy soil. She dips her head, and her hair falls over her face like a dark curtain.

  “I don’t want anyone knowing about it. I don’t like to talk about it. I had to leave my other school because everybody kept wanting to ask me questions all the time. I can’t stand questions like that.”

  Stacy rushes past me toward the ladder. She slides across it fast and then runs up the hill, only she turns the wrong way on the slate path and goes through the wrong double doors, right inside the lower school. I follow her, fast. She gets all the way to the painted mural wall a bunch of us made a few years ago before she stops and turns around. “I only told you because you’re someone I can trust,” she says, crossing her arms and then crossing them the other way. She’s standing in front of my part of the mural: a girl kicking a soccer ball. One leg looks like a bat, and the hair looks like a bell. I’m a crappy artist. “I can trust you, can’t I?” Stacy says, crossing her arms the other way, for the millionth time. I only wait for a second, thinking about how hard it will be not telling Tim, or Simon, about Stacy’s father. Especially Tim. I tell him everything.

  “You can trust me,” I finally say. Because when people tell you a secret, it’s like a gift. You don’t just give it away to someone else, even if you never asked for it in the first place.

  3

  “NO OFFENSE,” I hear Teddy saying when we’re getting ready for lunch, “but I can’t help you, buddy.” Besides being really fat, Teddy’s a vocabulary genius. Plus, he’s beaten the college kids at the city math contest two years in a row.

  “Come on, man,” Danny’s begging. “I don’t understand that tenths crap.” Danny’s got blue hair, and he sucks at math. He follows Teddy over to the rectangular table. I grab my brown bag and watch Stacy, who’s leaning against the lockers.

  “Actually,” Teddy goes, “it’s tens, not tenths.”

  “Decimals,” Sebastian says to Danny, bumping himself into a seat. “Not fractions, you idget.” Danny flips him the finger, and Stacy glances my way and cracks a smile. The gap in her teeth winks at me.

  Simon looks at her. “You doing okay?” I hear him ask.

  “Yeah,” Stacy says. “I’m good.”

  I step over and grab her arm. “Sit here.”

  Tim plops down next to us at the square table.

  “You forgot your lunch?” he goes to Stacy as she pulls some wrinkled bills out of her back pocket.

  “Where’s the cafeteria?”

  “We don’t have one,” Tim says. He takes a stack of green papers from Danny, pulls us each a sheet, and then hands off the pile to Viv at the next table.

  “Wild,” Stacy goes. “No bells, no gym, no cafeteria.” I hand her half my sandwich, and she takes it without missing a beat. “Totally wild.” She bites into the bread. “Thanks,” she goes, after she swallows. “I owe you.”

  Tim glances at her, trying to figure her out, I guess, like I’ve been doing all morning. It’s hard not being allowed to tell him her secret.

  “Okay, guys.” Simon claps his hands together twice. He’s standing in the middle of the room, turning his head in every direction so we can all hear. “The green paper has some reminders for your parents on the camping trip which, FYI, is in less than two weeks.” He hands a stack of yellow papers to Teddy, who takes one and passes the rest around. “The yellow paper is the permission slip and medical form for the fall soccer league.” Simon unwraps a tuna sandwich from a piece of plastic wrap that he saves and reuses all the time. “I know next fall seems like it’s far away, but I need these back ASAP.”

  “Hey, Simon,” Danny says, “are we going to get to play any public schools next year? My cousin’s on Lincoln’s team, and I want to kick his butt.”

  “It’s a private-school league,” Marie goes, as if Danny’s stupid or something—which he sort of is sometimes, but she doesn’t have to be such a priss about it.

  Simon ignores Marie. “No, Danny,” he goes. “Private schools play private schools. Public schools play public.”

  “I’d have to go to Lincoln with Danny’s cousin next year if I didn’t go here,” Tim says. I would too. Lincoln’s the only public school in my district. And except for Forest Alternative, my parents don’t really like the private schools around here. Tim called my mom a “reverse snob” once, and he’s probably right.

  “Lots of public schools are decent,” Stacy says loudly. “Like Clearview and Rockwell. But Lincoln sucks.”

  “Yeah?” Danny goes, dragging a chair over to our table. “How do you know?”

  “I just came from there, Goldilocks,” Stacy answers, tilting her head at him like she thinks he’s cute. Danny smiles and runs his hand through his hair. Blue looks good on him, and he knows it. Stacy keeps talking. “Lincoln’s got hundreds of kids, and only the special-ed ones have the same teacher all day. The bathrooms are just stalls with no doors, and h
alf the time the toilets are stopped up.” Tim shoves one of his peanut butter crackers toward her. “Thanks,” she goes, and then she nods at Teddy. “I hate to say it, but kids like you get beat up all the time.”

  “Really?” He squints at her. “For what?”

  Stacy starts pressing numbers on her calculator watch. “What’s one hundred and eight times four hundred and sixty-four divided by point five?” She punches all the buttons as fast as she talks. I guess she saw Teddy in action earlier.

  “One hundred thousand two hundred and twenty-four,” Teddy goes.

  Stacy glances at her wrist. “Wow.”

  The rest of us are quiet for a minute.

  “Besides,” Sebastian finally says to Teddy, “you’re fat.” Teddy goes pink. “Relax,” Sebastian tells him. Then he turns to Stacy. “They’d crucify me at Lincoln, right?” He means because he’s crippled. Challenged. Whatever.

  Stacy leans her chair back onto its hind legs and balances there. “Truthfully?” Her tongue ring flashes at us. “They’d make you ride a different bus and put you in the same room with all the special-ed kids all day.” She brings her chair back to the floor with a thump and lets out a big sigh. “Punks,” she says quiet to Sebastian. He shrugs and then stares at his nubby elbows. The rest of us stare anywhere but at him.

  “Are any of the teachers like Simon?” Tim asks.

  Stacy sighs again. “You’d never call Lincoln teachers by their first names,” she goes. “They’re almost as bad as the kids. The kids there are a bunch of idiots.” She tilts her head at all of us this time. “You guys are a lot cooler.” A compliment from Stacy seems like a big deal somehow. Even Danny looks shy all of a sudden.

  He pushes his chair back, crumples up his lunch bag, and hooks it into the garbage can. “Last one to the net is second pick,” he yells, and he’s out the door.

  “Hey, no fair,” Tim goes, bolting out of his chair.

  “See you later,” I say to Stacy, and I’m gone.

  * * *

  Our soccer field isn’t so great, even compared to Lincoln’s, which isn’t any big deal, either. But at least Lincoln’s has grass and actual goalposts. Our field at Forest Alternative is mostly dirt, full of holes, and a total mud bath when it rains. We don’t have posts, much less real nets, so we use jackets or logs to mark our goals. Still, it’s better than playing on the blacktop, which we had to do until a couple of years ago, before they bulldozed a better space for us—one that wouldn’t have cars coming and going all the time.