know why. Maybe being the odd girl out for most of my school career did it; maybe I just thought Malcolm didn’t need to be so obviously nasty. Aside from acting as if I didn’t exist, Margie Miller hadn’t ever been truly mean to me.
“Saw your name in the paper, Elena,” she said.
I went cold. The newspaper article had been Malcolm’s idea. He’d said something about credit where credit was due, and I let the reporter interview me, answering her questions with simple one-word responses, not really wanting the word to get out about my spontaneous brainchild of merit-based cards and separate lunch lines and free tickets to Friday games. I nearly blurted out an apology to Margie right there and then, in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and ears.
She beat me to the punch. “Here’s what I think of your stupid idea.”
Now I really did go cold, even though my face was hot with embarrassment. Margie had been taking delicate little sips of juice from a bottle. She wasn’t drinking anymore; she was pouring it on me. My hair absorbed most of it, but didn’t stop the sticky liquid from streaking my white blouse, from staining me from head to toe.
“There. Now you look like a Creamsicle, you stinking Kraut.” She marched off, back to her table, and the cafeteria exploded around me with laughter.
I’d been called names before. Four-Eyes in grade school. Miss Know-It-All later on. Foul-Ball Fischer in gym class. All of them were at least based on something. But Kraut? I’d never heard that one, and it stung, mostly because it wasn’t true. My parents were Americans, as was I.
In the hall bathroom, I changed my yellow-stained blouse for a T-shirt from my gym bag, and I thought of how much I hated Margie Miller and the rest of her stupid, snooty friends. I didn’t want to be like them, I decided. I would never be like them.
Margie Miller ended up with a three-day suspension, during which she sat in a library carrel polishing her nails. I ended up with a new nickname that I didn’t shake until my senior year, when my parents transferred me to a private school an hour’s drive away. It reached a point where I stopped buying anything in the cafeteria, if only to avoid the notoriety of the gold-and-green-card line. I made excuses to avoid football games and dances, anything that set me apart.
None of my actions did one bit of good. Margie seemed to be ever present in locker rooms and hallways. If I took a shower after gym, eyes squeezed shut against soap, someone would turn off the hot water, giggling as I scrambled to find the tap or ran out from the stall covered in suds. The frogs and worms and crawfish from biology lab would mysteriously make their way into my lunch bag. One Monday morning, I opened my locker to find a spray-painted swastika on the inside of the door.
“They’re stupid pranks,” Malcolm said after each occasion. “Ignore them.”
I tried, and I couldn’t. “They’re stupid people,” I said. Margie waggled her manicured nails at me from her table with the pretty/rich/jock people.
And then, I said something without thinking, something I’d one day regret.
“Wouldn’t it be great if all the people we hated could carry their crappy GPAs around for life?”
Malcolm agreed. And he smiled.
SEVENTY-ONE
After another early-afternoon crowd crosses from the Methodist church to Patisserie Paul, it dawns on me that I haven’t eaten since Friday. I’ve been living on sparkling water since Malcolm brought me home. The fact is, even the thought of water brings a fresh wave of nausea, but Patisserie Paul will have Wi-Fi. And happy, pastry-munching churchgoers with cell phones, the kind of people who read stories about good Samaritans.
If I were dressed in anything but sweat-stained pajamas, I might venture it. But I’m not. One glance in the side mirror tells me I look like hell. Also, I don’t have shoes and I don’t have money. I don’t have anything I need, and there are so few good Samaritans to count on. The jogger to my right, ponytail swinging like a pendulum, is listening to music, puffing her way through another