It has become a rite of passage on the first day of school. Eighth-grade girls warn seventh-grade girls to stay away, run away, sneak away from Fingertip, dean of dress coding.
Fingertip is most famous for the act of making girls stand still and extend their arms straight so she can decide if their fingertips fall below their shorts (which almost always happens, because no stores sell shorts that long).
So life at Fisher Middle is a pulling game. When you see Fingertip, pull down your shorts. But don’t pull them down too low, or your stomach will show. It’s better if you learn her pattern so you can avoid her altogether. But if she does get you, don’t talk back.
She has her favorite targets—the bigger girls, the girls with boobs and butts, the prettiest girls, and the girls with long legs.
Nobody has ever seen her stop a boy.
Some people believe Fingertip is a robot with a bob haircut, orthopedic shoes, and a grubby old burgundy sweater she sometimes makes people wear if they can’t change their clothes in a timely manner, and that Dr. Couchman programmed her to say seven things:
Extend your arms.
Bra strap.
This is a warning.
Pull it up.
Pull it down.
What’s it going to take to get you girls to listen?
Down to the office. Now.
Robot or human, Fingertip and her sweater are as popular at Fisher Middle School as Mondays, math tests, and mold on the hamburger buns.
IT’S OKAY TO TRICK YOUR FRIENDS IF IT’S FOR A GOOD CAUSE
I bribe my friends with pizza. I don’t tell them why I need them to drop everything and get over to my house.
I don’t have money and my parents are at Dad’s work dinner, so I make Danny order with the selling-vaping-supplies-to-middle-schoolers money. It feels gross, because I’m about to feed my friends crime-money pizza, but it’s for the greater good.
“I need to go. I have a lot of homework,” Pearl says.
I know Pearl feels guilty. If she had offered her sweatpants right away, instead of hesitating, going to her locker, and then running around the school looking for Olivia, none of this would have happened.
“Just do the homework here,” I say. “We won’t bother you.”
Olivia and I lie on the floor, watching a pack of nervous birds going back and forth between our tree and another tree. Pearl is sticking her tongue out, trying to concentrate on math.
“Do you resent your boobs?” I say, pointing at Olivia’s chest.
“Yes. Do you resent not having boobs?” she says.
“Yes.”
She laughs. “Remember when nobody had boobs and we could just focus on fake-dating boys at recess?”
“Those were the days.”
A loud thump makes us jump. Somebody is banging on the tree-house floor.
I pull the rope, and the door squeaks open. Ashley pokes her head through and climbs in. Her face drops. She looks confused, like our dog, Thibodeaux, when my cousin’s parrot barks back at him.
“Wait, what?” Ashley says, looking down at Navya and Bea, who are coming up behind her.
“Calm down and just get in here,” I say.
They ball up their fists and stand in the corner—well, half stand, because the ceilings are a little too low for us now.
“Sit,” I order. I’m not sure where I’m getting this new bossy attitude. I think those two minutes in the garden, witnessing Couchman and Dern humiliate my old friend, permanently altered my DNA.
“Hey, guys,” Pearl says, closing her math book and stuffing it in her backpack.
My friends’ first thought is most likely: Why is Pearl here in Molly’s tree house with the girl who ruined eighth grade?
“Women, I brought you here to clear things up. I know stuff. Pearl knows stuff. Olivia is innocent. And the real villains here are Couchman and his little henchman, Dern.”
I should write fairy tales.
“Okaaaaay,” Navya says. She can be difficult when she’s mad and in a confined space.
“Sit down,” I say.
And they do.
THE LIST OF THINGS WE HAD PLANNED TO DO ON THE EIGHTH-GRADE CAMPING TRIP TO STRAWBERRY HILL STATE PARK
Sneak out of our tent and meet in the woods to play truth or dare with the baseball boys (specific to Ashley, because the rest of us don’t like the baseball boys).
Wear whatever we want, because the dress-code agreement will be over.
Eat as many bags of gummy candy as possible (specific to Bea, who will get her braces off a few days before the camping trip).
Swim in the lake at midnight.
Try to stay up until morning.
MY PLAN WORKS
It doesn’t take much convincing after I tell Ashley, Navya, and Bea what I saw and then Pearl tells how she had tapped Olivia on the shoulder as she was getting up from science and whispered in her ear something no girl ever wants to hear. Olivia tells how embarrassed she was and how she was going to go to the nurse, but she was afraid a boy might be there getting an ear check or a Band-Aid, so she rushed to her locker to get her phone and call her sister to bring her new pants. Then Pearl tells how she remembered she had new Pink sweatpants in her locker, so she grabbed them and went running around the school looking for Olivia. That’s when she saw Couchman pull Olivia out to the garden.
By the end of my explanation, Navya, Ashley, and Bea are hugging Olivia, the real kind of hugging that squeezes your breath out of you for a few seconds.
“We can do our own camping trip,” Bea says. “It’s not like he was taking us to Europe.”
“You know why he did this, right?” I say. “He bribed us so we would do what he wants like good little children. And it worked. We fell for it.”
“I guarantee he had Fingertip roaming the halls even more, looking for somebody to dress code so he didn’t have to take us on the trip,” Navya says.