Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,6

I won’t. If Sarah had B lunch, that would be one thing. Or if any of my old friends from Wheeler Middle, or just one single solitary person I recognized as a compadre, a sympathetic soul, a friendly face, a non-serial-killer type, were there to eat lunch with, I’d be fine. I’m not picky.

Unfortunately, B lunch is filled with football stars, prom queens, and ex-convicts, all of them total strangers and intimidating beyond belief. I lasted through two days of eating my egg salad sandwich and carrot sticks by myself, feeling small and exposed, like a fawn surrounded by hunters in pickup trucks with their headlights on high beam. I knew that no one was actually looking at me, and it soon became obvious that the only reason anyone would ever look at me was if I’d unwittingly come to school with, say, goat cheese smeared all over the back of my jeans. Feeling exposed and invisible at the same time was too much. I fled.

What made my loneliness even harder during those early days of my freshman year was my mother’s assumption that I would love high school just as much as she had. She practically plowed me down the minute I got home to hear about my day. “High school is where it all begins, Janie,” she’d enthused as she handed me a brownie and a glass of milk. “Now sit down and tell me everything that happened today.”

My mumbled, unenthusiastic replies marked a change in our relationship. Up until my freshman year, I’d been happy to tell my mother the tiniest details of my day. I was famous among local mothers of middle school daughters for being the one who still confided in her mother, who still liked to go shopping with her mother, who still spoke in polysyllabic sentences to her mother. I’d read enough books and seen enough movies to recognize the weirdness of this for myself, but I honestly thought that things would never change between us. You know how some people never get acne? I thought I’d never get tired of my mother greeting me at the door every afternoon with milk and cookies.

I did.

In fact, it didn’t take long before I could feel my chest tightening as I walked down the gravel driveway toward the house after the bus dropped me off. By the time I got through the door, I thought it was possible I might actually punch my mother if she said one more positive word to me about the wonders of freshman year. I started coming into the house through the screen porch so I could take the back staircase to my room and avoid her altogether.

Now, six weeks later, my mom no longer makes a big deal out of me being in high school. She has turned her energy and enthusiasm toward Avery, who loves the bejeebers out of third grade and the farm and doing stuff my mom loves to do, like baking and going to the flea market to buy hand-cranked grain mills and quilts so old that their original colors have faded into patches of gray and more gray. I lie on my bed upstairs and listen to them chirp together like birds, and I can’t decide if what I’m feeling is sort of weirdly jealous or totally disdainful. It’s a feeling that gets stuck in my throat, whatever it is.

The bus bounces over a series of potholes that bloomed last spring and are now enjoying the nice fall weather. The potholes mark ten more minutes until we reach Manneville High School, which means I have ten minutes to think cheerful, positive thoughts that will get me through the rest of my day. I remind myself that Sarah promised to leave a note in my locker before first period, a note that will be typed on an old manual typewriter that has become Sarah’s trademark style, will run several single-spaced, hilarious pages, and will definitely include details from her older sister Emma’s weekend escapades.

“We really ought to do Emma for our project,” Sarah had said on Saturday, and I could see her point. Emma was not yet a historic figure, but undoubtedly would be one day, at least in the annals of Manneville High School. She’s a straight-A student, honor roll every semester, and completely wild. No one has ever actually seen her crack a textbook, but pretty much everyone has seen her show up at school on the back of a Harley-Davidson, her hands