Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,20
not like I want to do the Bobbsey Twins any favors, but even I can’t stand to watch a third grader cry.
Both my mom and Avery nod. Avery even manages a little smile and wipes a tear from her cheek. “I’ll let you keep Bowser on your bed all week if you fix it, Janie.”
Bowser is Avery’s stuffed . . . something. I can’t remember what Bowser used to be. All I know is that he’s in even worse shape than Avery’s shirt. “That’s okay,” I tell her, trying to sound nice about it. “You don’t have to give me anything. I’m happy to help.”
I pick up the various pieces of torn pink fabric, and my mom pulls some pink and green polka-dotted ribbon from a Jo-Ann’s bag along with a spool of pink thread. “Do you want to try the treadle machine?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, and head up the stairs to my room. In my closet, I find the old Singer sewing machine passed down to me by my grandmother when I was eight. I drag it out and set it up on my desk. It’s a pretty low-tech machine, but it works. For a long time I made easy things like A-line skirts and cotton/polyester blend tees, but now for the most part, I don’t make new clothes on my sewing machine, I re-create old ones. This past summer I went through a serious cuff stage, where I bought cool vintage fabric off of eBay and made roll-up cuffs for all my jeans and shorts. More recently, I’ve had a “What can you do with a thrift shop men’s shirt?” stage and an “Is it possible to make a skirt out of a T-shirt?” stage (the answer being yes, if you know how to put in an elastic waistband).
As I move around the scraps of Avery’s T-shirt like puzzle pieces, figuring out the best way to put them back together, I think about last year and how in my group of friends—Sarah, Lauren, Sonia, Rebecca, and the two Hannahs—I was known as the creative one because of the stuff I did with my clothes. Sarah had the girl genius and world-changer thing going on, Lauren wore the title of Total Jock, and Sonia and Rebecca were band geeks. The two Hannahs weren’t really known for anything, which was part of their charm. They were like fans who cheered the rest of us on.
In fact, it occurs to me as I’m pinning fabric together, it’s possible that out of everyone in my old group of friends I miss the Hannahs most of all. It was nice to come to school and have one Hannah or the other make a big deal out of my latest creation. It made me feel special.
Of course, nowadays I feel as special as a speck of dust. Sarah, who’s the only one I see on a regular basis anymore, takes my clothes for granted. If I’m wearing a cool new pair of shoes, Sarah notices. A skirt I made out of an old pair of jeans and some killer fabric scraps? That’s old news to Sarah. Nothing was old news to the Hannahs.
I sigh and begin to snip around the ragged edges of the shirt’s hemline. In middle school, whenever I looked ahead to my high school years, I always saw myself in a crowd of friends. We were laughing and on our way some-where—to the pep rally or a football game—or walking through South Pointe Mall en masse. In my daydreams, our group had expanded to include boys, cute, funny, smart boys, boys who liked to tease and cut up in a crowd but who, one-on-one, could be thoughtful and serious.
Instead who do I get?
Monster Monroe.
In the first two months of high school, Monster is the only guy who’s paid me any attention at all. Well, there’s Jeremy Fitch, but he doesn’t really count. I’m not deluded enough to think that if Sarah and I stopped tracking Jeremy down at his locker, he would suddenly start showing up at ours. In fact, Jeremy has done an excellent job of being friendly without actually becoming a friend.
But as he walked me and Sarah down the C hallway this afternoon, Monster showed definite interest in being friends. He clearly didn’t know about my alter ego, the odiferous Farm Girl, or if he did, he didn’t care. He asked a ton of questions about what kind of music we listened to, shaking his