Mary Kate has been sitting next to me on the bus ride home ever since that day.
“Toad, do you have any food?” Danny says to Mary Kate. He calls her Toad, and me Frog. We have no idea why.
“No,” she says. When he’s not looking, she slides her hand into the front pocket of her backpack and hands me a slightly melted Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
“Is it true about that girl Olivia getting her thingy and, like, having an accident and getting dress coded in the middle of it?” Mary Kate asks me.
“Yeah. It’s all true. Pretty awful, huh?”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Dress coding? It did every minute of every day until they came up with that stupid camping-trip bribe.”
“No. I mean accidents.” Mary Kate looks terrified again. I’m pretty confident she would rather suffocate slowly in a vat of peanut butter than stain her pants in school.
I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m no expert. “No. Not at all. But keep a spare pair of sweatpants in your locker at all times, just to be safe.”
“I will.”
Danny reaches across the aisle and waves a twenty-dollar bill in Mary Kate’s face. “I see you eating, Toad. Twenty bucks for one peanut butter cup.”
“I’m all out.” Mary Kate is also terrified of people who vape.
Danny pulls a flash-drive-shaped device out of his pocket and sucks in the vapor. It disgusts me.
The seventh grader next to him, a kid named Ted, elbows Danny to share. Danny holds it up to Ted’s mouth, and Ted sucks in.
Frog and Toad are so disgusted we can’t even finish our peanut butter cups.
IF YOU’RE NOT A BIG FISH, YOUR MOM WON’T FEEL LIKE FRYING YOU
My mom treats Danny like he’s a toddler, which is why she felt the need to quit her job at the food bank last year to go back to being a full-time parent.
She loved that job.
“Hi, honey. How was your day?” she says, trying to get close enough to sniff Danny’s clothes for traces of mango or mint, the most popular vaping flavors.
“Good,” Danny says, wiggling away from her as he flings open the pantry. Danny is beginning to learn that if he just says “Good” and doesn’t give her attitude, she’ll leave him alone.
“How about you, Molly Mae?” Luckily, she doesn’t feel the need to sniff me. “How was your math test?”
“Fine.” I search the fridge for milk to wash down my peanut butter cup. Thibodeaux flings himself at me, and I toss him a biscuit from the Tibby treat jar.
“Has everyone recovered from the camping-trip news? Daddy was bummed it was canceled. He just ordered you a really cool LED flashlight.” She watches Danny walk up the stairs.
“Don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous that they canceled the trip after one dress-code incident?” I say.
“Well, it was kind of an incentive thing. I see what they were trying to do, and as the principal said, rules are rules.”
She moves in and stands close. “Did he vape on the way home?” she whispers, her hot breath tickling my ear.
“Not that I saw,” I lie. I wish she would focus on my life for once. “I don’t even care about the camping trip.”
“Really? But you’ve been looking forward to it all spring.”
“I think the dress coding at our school is out of control. Can you go in and talk to the principal about how wrong it is to walk around school policing what people wear? Specifically, policing what girls wear?”
She looks at me in a that-is-not-a-normal-Molly-thing-to-say way. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry, hon. And besides, in a few weeks you’ll be on your way to high school. I’ve heard they’re much more lenient about dress coding there. Maybe too lenient.”
“Now that the camping trip is canceled, can I just wear whatever I want?”
“Why would you ask for trouble?”
“Because I want to take a stand on something for once in my life.”
She tilts her head and is probably thinking, Who are you, and what have you done to my child? She’s not upset about the camping trip, and she wants to take a stand on something?
“You know what, Molly? I would be okay with that. As long as you’re covering your tush, of course.”
“So if you get a call to bring me clothes, you won’t be mad?”
“No. I won’t be mad. I’ll tell them my daughter is dressed just fine. How about that?”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I’m proud of you, hon.”
Sometimes you need to fry the little fish too.
GILBERT PETTIBONES WAFFLE THE THIRD
Bea and I were forced to be friends on a rainy October morning in first grade, when all the classes lined up for the field-trip bus and we had the bad luck of being the only two girls in our bus group. We panicked, stared at each other, and, without saying a word, sat together. At first, we stared straight ahead because I didn’t know her name and she didn’t know mine. But then she offered me a sugar cookie from her brown-bag lunch, and I offered her chips from my brown-bag lunch.
“Be-uh?” I said, looking at the name written on her brown bag.
“Bee,” she said. “Like buzzzzzzzzz.”
We giggled, because that’s what first graders do.
We held hands and followed the teacher around the village, watching people dressed up like colonists weave on looms and knead dough and teach us about herbs in the medicine garden.
“Look, a tiny mouse,” Bea said. And she scooped up the mouse, a baby for sure, because it was the size of a first grader’s thumb, and held it quivering in her hand. We put it in my brown bag (after I took out the sandwich and the rest of the chips), and we made it a bed of grass and leaves.
Our teacher wouldn’t let us keep the mouse, even though we had big plans of sharing it forever. “I’ll take him one week; you take him the next week,” Bea had said.
We released the tiny mouse back into the medicine garden, right under the sage plant where we’d found him. “He probably has a mom who would miss him, anyway,” I said. Bea was busy drawing on her brown bag.
“There,” she said when she was done. “Now we’ll remember him.”
The picture looked just like the mouse. I was impressed.
“Let’s give him a name,” I said.
We named him Gilbert Pettibones Waffle the Third. I don’t remember where we got that name. But I do remember thinking Bea would be a good person to have around.