Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,8

usually do when we hit the dreaded one-mile mark. By this time, the bus has filled up with competing scents—serious applications of spicy aftershaves and citrusy body mists, the minty smell of toothpaste, wintergreen gum, Altoids, the slight whiff of a recently smoked joint, and the unfortunate odor of gym shoes long past their prime, all mixed up with lung-crushing exhaust fumes (but thankfully no goat poop)—and I feel sort of sick, a feeling that will most likely stay with me for the rest of the day.

I wish I could come up with a great project topic, if only to impress the twelve girls and one guy who take Great Girls and Women of American History. Just once this year, I want someone to look at me and think, Huh, she seems kind of neat instead of Huh, I wonder why she smells like manure. Just once I want someone to think, What a nice, normal human being with totally good ideas. Just one single time I want someone to think, Hey, that Janie Gorman’s pretty interesting.

Because I am, you know. And not just because I talk to goats.

Chapter Five

Lemmingville

As promised, Sarah’s note is waiting for me, taped to the inside of my locker door. The morning note is a long tradition between us, established after my family moved to Farm World. We talk on the phone all the time and text each other constantly, but that’s not enough somehow. Besides, in this age of technological wonders, actually writing words on paper using your own hand and that crude device known as an ink pen (or in Sarah’s case, a manual typewriter) seems really cool and countercultural.

We got that idea from Emma, of course. We get all of our cool, countercultural ideas from her.

Dear Janiesayqua, the note begins, and continues, Janie say wha—? Please get it through your head that this is going to be a most fantabulous day.

Typical Sarah. She’s disturbed that I’m still eating lunch in the library after two months of high school. She thinks I should be past that by now. This is easy for Miss A lunch to say, she who has spent every lunch period since the first day of school surrounded by our old friends from Wheeler Middle, she who has algebra with Lauren Basco and Sonia Meeker, English I with Rebecca Wade and Hannah Anders, and PE with all of the above plus Marcy Wilder, Wren Briggs, and Hannah Wolfe.

Please eat lunch in the cafeteria today! (See, what did I tell you?) There’s a really cool girl in PE named MacKenzie who has B lunch. She went to McDougal for middle school, but she isn’t scary at all, and she has a lot of friends who did Battle of the Books last year, so you know they’re our kind of people.

I fold Sarah’s note and put it in the front pocket of my backpack. I like to stretch it out over the course of the morning, saving a big chunk of it for lunch, the social nadir of my day.

The halls are not just crowded. They are not merely packed. They are overrun, like termite-infested logs. That anyone can actually move at all is a miracle of modern physics. Manneville High School is famous for the state of its bursting seams. New subdivisions pop up on the outskirts of town on a daily basis, feeding more and more lemmings into the stream of public education, and yet no one can quite work up the interest to build a new high school.

I’ve volunteered to quit, just to make more room, on several occasions since the beginning of school, but my parents think I’m joking.

I’m not.

I duck my head and begin the seemingly uphill climb to Algebra I with Mrs. Gina Redfearn, the oldest teacher in captivity, and maybe the meanest. “I’m old school, people,” she warned us the first day of class. “I’m not here to make friends.” And she’s really not, as she made abundantly clear on Day One, when she gave us a pop quiz immediately after calling roll. The first day. And it counted.

I’ve found the secret to surviving Algebra I with Mrs. Redfearn is to keep your head down. Literally. She takes direct eye contact as an act of aggression and responds in kind. There are just enough do-gooder straight-A types in this class, kids who are all about direct eye contact and class participation, to keep Mrs. Redfearn occupied through the entire forty-three-minute period.

Today, first thing, there’s a