At night, she often woke in the middle of the night in cold, urine-soaked sheets. “Such a baby,” she thought to herself. Mother always bragged how Girl toilet-trained herself at eighteen months, because it was hot outside and Girl wanted to run around naked. “You have to wear a diaper until you pee on the potty,” Mother had said, and Girl had promptly peed on the potty and spent the rest of the day running around without clothes. How had she gone from being advanced at bladder control to suddenly having accidents in fourth grade? She couldn’t trust her body when it was asleep. Too mortified to tell Mother, Girl crept down the dark hall to the linen closet in search of a dry towel. She laid the towel over the wet spot and went back to sleep.
liz
It was the first day of sixth grade, and Girl was in Mr. Malley’s homeroom. She was wearing her favorite skirt: a long, purple granny skirt printed with little flowers that had an eyelet ruffle at the bottom. Juli had taken her shopping last year, and Father had bought everything Juli had picked out. The skirt no longer reached her mid-calf, like it used to, but Girl figured that it worked as a knee-length one. By the time she got to school, though, she realized that she was wrong. She could hear the whispered comments and see the eye-rolls. Girl was a skinny-legged stork, and yes, they were right, it did look a little bit like her legs turned in, now that she looked closely. Her knees were indeed too big. Her outfit was, yes, just like they said, stupid and horribly out of style. It was the not-knowing, the foolish pride she felt, that most made her want to cry. She pushed up her big, golden-brown plastic glasses and tried to ignore the other girls, like Stepmother always told her to do. “Just don’t respond and they’ll get bored,” Stepmother admonished any time she complained, but Stepmother underestimated the tenacity of sixth graders. Girl just stopped talking about it at home. It was pointless.
She had Mr. Malley for first period math, too, which was her least favorite subject. When he called roll he paused at her name.
“Lillibridge? Didn’t I have your brother last year?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Girl said. She hated following in Brother’s footsteps at school, because all of his uncoolness rubbed off on her.
“Why don’t I save us all a lot of time and just send you down to basic math now?” he asked. Everyone laughed. Girl was too busy not-crying to explain that she had never gotten less than a B in anything besides handwriting, and even that C made her so sad she wanted to close her eyes and never wake up. She was left-handed and she couldn’t make her hand work the way they wanted it to. But she’d always gotten As and Bs in math, even though she hated it.
She looked around the room and noticed a new girl. Her school had had pretty much the same kids since fourth grade; new kids were practically unheard of. New Girl asked the teacher a lot of stupid questions about what supplies were acceptable, like could a Trapper Keeper work as a three-ring binder, for instance; things everyone else knew already from last year. The new girl wore glasses, like Girl. Unlike Girl, she was overweight. She was bigger than Michelle and nearly as big as Laura, who had so far been the biggest girls in school. The new girl’s name was Liz.
Girl had always been a one-best-friend person. Sure, she had enough acquaintances to be able to find someone to sit next to at lunch or to fill up a birthday party, but since first grade it had been Girl and Gretchen. Velcro sisters. That was until last year, when they got into a fight and never talked to each other again. But Liz’s notebook had brown horses on the front cover, and Girl was not horse-crazy.
“We’re going to get you after school,” Timmy said to Girl between classes. He was one of the popular kids, and even though he was short and freckled he was tough.
The popular kids, of whom Girl most certainly was not one, had had a party with kissing or sex or something. Someone told on them, and they all had to go see the guidance counselor one at a time and everyone said that the popular kids had to take off all their clothes and talk about their bodies and sex. The student elite were filled with a murderous rage for the snitch, and for some reason, they had decided that snitch was Girl. She never would have told, even if she had known—she wanted them to like her so damn badly. She would have done just about anything to get invited to a popular kid’s party. Of course no one believed her, and she was going to get beaten up as soon as the last bell rang. It was a mile-and-a-half walk home, and Brother was now in junior high, so she would be on her own. She knew that she couldn’t run that far.
Liz had overheard them, though.
“I’ll walk home with you,” she said. “No one is gonna mess with you when you are with me. If they try, I’ll sit on them.”
Girl looked at her, confused. Was she making fun of herself?
“Hey, I know what they say about me,” Liz explained. “I just turn it around on them before they get a chance.” Girl had never met someone so confident before, so accepting
