Margie Miller twit wants a better lunch, she can study harder,” he said once as Margie stood at the end of a long line. “Same for the stupid jocks.”
Maybe it was the old scars that kept me going, the taunts and jeers about my old dresses or the weird food my mother cooked; maybe it was Malcolm opening them up and rubbing a little salt in the wounds, keeping them red and raw and fresh, reminding me how they treated us before we became they. Maybe I was just a nasty bitch, because I remember smiling when he said that.
It wasn’t as if I knew where things were headed. No one could have known.
FORTY-THREE
“Maybe she’s got one of them demerit charts in her office,” Ruby Jo says, taking two more trays and setting them in a line on the steel counter. “Three strikes and you get walloped with the cook’s wooden spoon.”
I hear the words and register something like humor in them, but I don’t laugh.
Lissa puts an arm around my shoulders. “Oh, honey,” she says, pulling my tray along for me.
Dinner is meat loaf, a sludge-like substance the cooks behind the food line call mashed potatoes, and a mountain of corn on the side. When we turn to look for three empty spaces, Mrs. Underwood scowls again and taps her watch.
I smile in her direction, imagining the watch being crammed down her throat. With a little help from me.
Ruby Jo has explained everything to Lissa, so I’ve got a sympathy contingent on each side as we take our trays across the dining hall toward the only vacant seats.
They would be at Alex’s table. A bit of chatter erupts around the room when we sit down, then dies off as suddenly as it began.
Alex’s presence bugs the shit out of me, but an ally is an ally, even if his eyes are taking turns studying paperwork and checking out my legs. I make a weak attempt at a friendly smile. He returns it and goes back to multitasking, leaving Lissa, Ruby Jo, and me to talk among ourselves.
I steal several glances at the table where Freddie is sitting, squeezed between two older girls, staring down at an untouched plate of meat and starch. She comes close to disappearing in the oversized pinafore, and now I’m worrying if she’s eaten anything at all in the past two days.
At six forty-five, a bell rings, loud and shrill, signaling an end to dinner. As if they’ve been choreographed, the children push back their benches in unison, stand up, and turn to face the main door leading outside. There’s no chatter, no whispered schoolgirl crushes or boyish jokes, only silence as the rows of children assemble into two gender-separated lines. I wonder for a moment what Mrs. Underwood does with the trans kids, the intersexuals, the ones who don’t fit into convenient “he” or “she” molds.
Probably nothing.
Freddie files out with the rest of her group, and I notice the purple band around her right sleeve, high up on her arm. It’s not something I remember packing on Monday morning, and in any event, I can’t recall Freddie ever being a fanatic about purple. That’s Anne’s color; Freddie prefers greens and blues.
There are yellow bands and red bands and blue bands. An entire rainbow of color decorates the uniforms of the boys and girls following a pair of matronly women out the door. The two girls who were sitting on either side of Freddie wear blue. A small boy, who wouldn’t be much taller than Freddie if he were standing instead of sitting in a wheelchair, rolls toward me. His colors are purple and dark blue. The last girl in line, tall and lean with a noticeable baby bump, looks to be about seventeen years old. She’s the only one wearing a red band on her arm.
“What are you looking at?” Alex asks when he sees me staring.
Ruby Jo’s foot finds my ankle under the table. Hard.
“Nothing. Just the children,” I say, pushing my tray away, as far toward the center of the table as physics allows. The corn was edible, but there’s still a pile of it left on my