Chapter 18: Part 18 - Tuesday

Part 18 — Tuesday

Nothing important that happens in school happens in lesson times. In recess: sure. Before and after school: all the time. In the lunch period: mostly. But in lesson times, nothing important ever happens. Until it does. 

I’d wanted to catch Jessie before school but she was late again. In home room, we had this stupid quiz about drugs and alcohol that Mr Finaly insisted we take ‘super seriously’. 

Which drugs do you take? 

How much do you drink? 

Like, just because we’re teens, we’re all druggies, losers and dropouts. With all the quiz  stuff, I didn’t even get to talk to Jessie when she did come in. It was first period science where we finally got to talk. 

Science is normally a blast. We’ve got this really cool teacher called Dr Huffington, who is always blowing things up and measuring how much time it takes for processes and reactions to happen. But she was sick today, so we had this substitute. He looked about 102 years old and he’d already written his name on the board in impeccable cursive. ‘Mr Nevin.’ He now sat there, all 5’5” of him, white tufts of hair sticking out over his ears, trying to bring something up on one of the school iPads. 

Poor Mr Nevin. The tablet belonged to a different time from him. He was all clockwork steam engines, and this had bright flashing lights and a touch screen. Eventually, he managed to get into the class notes and we were able to start the lesson. 

I was braced for a boring, worksheet lesson – working in silence – but Dr Huffington had set this experiment for us to do. It was basically the same experiment we’d done last week, but with different amounts of chemicals. So it was fun and easy. But the best part was: Mr Nevin let us choose our lab partners. I chose Jessie, obviously, and we were off. 

I was still processing what Jessie had said to me yesterday in the Ella-only change room. Did she really mean what she said? Was that a thing that people did? Were there, like, parties where people did that kind of stuff together? Was that what her party was going to be on Friday? I was super nervous about the whole thing and, frankly, it was pressing down on the air between us, squeezing it into something hard and impenetrable. I had to clear it away, at least some of it.

I decided to open our conversation with something light and easy. 

“Who else is coming to your sleepover this Friday?” I asked. 

“Well, no one has said for sure yet,” she replied, “but I’ve invited, like, about 8 people. So there should be enough of us for fun times. You’re coming, right?” she added. 

I hadn’t actually confirmed I was yet. But eight people sounded like enough of a buffer for the evening not to get too weird. Oh, who was I kidding. I’d be the one bringing the weird. And one look at me in my PJs, bulging in all the wrong places, would bring screaming and pointing and parents. Parents were another thing weighing on my mind, too.

Something about Jessie’s dad just gave me a major creep-factor. His drinking, his swearing, his massages – like, seriously, euw! It was for both those reasons that I didn’t want to say yes now, only to chicken out at the last minute. But I really enjoyed hanging out with Jessie, and – especially after what Sue-Ellen had said at my party – I got the feeling that she didn’t have many real friends. And if she was going through what I feared she was going through – the sorts of things that would make her say to me what she had said to me in that gender neutral change-room – she just might need a friend more than anything else.

“Come on,” Jessie pleaded. “Please say you’ll come. I love spending time with you, and I don’t want it to be just me and my mom.”

Just her mom?

“So, your dad’s not gonna be there?” I asked. 

“No,” she confirmed. “He’s gotta go—” she stopped. She put down the chemical she was weighing out and stood close to me. She flashed me that smile of hers again: eyes down, then faraway, then entirely in my own.

 “—He’s not gonna be in town.”

I could breathe a sigh of relief. I tried not to actually breathe it right here and now. I think I kept it on the down low.

“Of course I’m coming!” I said back and side-nudged my hips into hers, playfully. Her whole face was lit up by her captivating smile and she nudged me back in a playful way that I wasn’t expecting and nearly sent me into the chemistry bench. 

See, this was normal. We were just two friends, goofing around. So far past the stranger-phase now. There was no judgment or fear or anything when I was with Jessie. She accepted me for who I was. 

We were just two goofs, friending around. 

I felt my left hand move involuntarily up to my shirt and trace the outline of the half yin-yang pendant underneath. I was certain it was Jessie who had given it to me, then maybe she’d grown too shy to admit to it.

“Jessie, did you—?” I asked, then stopped myself finishing the question. The room bubbled with chat and no one was really paying attention, so it wasn’t like anyone heard anything. But some things you don’t talk about until you’re alone. I’d get her alone at recess, maybe, and ask her then. It wouldn’t be one-way traffic. There were things I wanted to tell her too. Things you can only share with a best friend. A bestie. A Jessie_Bestie. What are best friends for if not for sharing secrets? And boy, did I have a lot of secrets to share. Rocks to lay down. I decided to lay some groundwork, first. 

“I had a fight with my dad the other day,” I said, changing tack. 

“Yeah,” she replied, empathically. “I had a fight with my mom last night. What the hell is it with parents?!”

“Your phone?” I asked, mixing up the chemicals and waiting for them to turn blue. Jessie was timing them with a stopwatch. 

“At first,” she replied. Then added, “I just wish my parents would let me live my life the way I wanna live it, instead of—”

“—The way they wished they’d lived theirs?” I asked, finishing her sentence. 

She rested her head on my shoulder and let out a melancholy, “Yeah.”

It felt nice with her head there. Peaceful. Natural. 

Mr Nevin started doing the roll-call. Most kids just tuned it out until it was their turn to say, “Present.”

“Your shoulder is super-bony, Ella,” Jessie said after a moment, lifting her head up. 

“Yeah, sorry,” I replied, my anxiety rising. “I am a bit of a beanpole.”

“Are you kidding?” Jessie asked. “I’d kill for your figure!”

“R-really?!” I asked, taken aback. 

“Yeah,” she replied, “you’re all thin and girly.”

“I’d kill for yours!” I joked back at her. “You’re all curvy and womanly. I don’t mean in a fat way! Just—” I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence, but I didn’t need to. She flashed me that winning smile again and I knew that she understood. When you just get each other, sometimes you don’t need words. And the really important things can’t be said anyway.

Somewhere in the distance of my attention span, Mr Nevin continued reading the roll call. 

Jessie envied my figure. That made me feel kind of proud. I caught myself looking down at my obviously flat chest.

“You never pad your bra?” Jessie asked, picking up on the really important things. 

“I don’t wear—” I replied. 

“Your binder then?” she asked. I started to go red. 

“You’re such a lol, Ella,” she joked, and picked up two crucibles from the table. She turned them over so the rounded bottoms stuck out and held them to my chest where my boobs should be. We collapsed into fits of giggles. But it didn’t take long to realize that we were the only ones laughing. 

We were the only ones making any noise at all.

Everyone else – everyone else – was staring. 

At me. 

Later on, in order to fully understand what was happening, I would piece together what I had missed while I was chatting with Jessie. The class had been working on their experiments, which mostly meant mixing chemicals and chatting like we were. What I had probably seen, but hadn’t really registered, was that one of the school secretaries had knocked on the door. 

“Mr Nevin,” the secretary whispered politely. “You haven’t done the roll call.”

“I can’t get this darned thing to work right,” he replied, looking forlornly at the screen on the tablet the school had given him. 

“That’s okay,” the receptionist replied. “Could you do it on paper?” she asked, waving a single sheet of white, printed paper for him. He smiled in gratitude and hobbled over to get the sheet. 

Jessie had just leant her head on my shoulder when he began. He worked his way diligently down the roll call, mispronouncing several of the names of the students on it (to the reply of giggles and eye-rolling), while Jessie and I continued our chat, ignoring him. I should have been paying more attention. But there was no way to know what was coming. 

“Stevenson?” I caught the tail end of Mr Nevin’s question, just as Jessie picked up the two crucibles and began to move them towards my body. But people weren’t looking at him. They were looking at me. 

“Errol Stevenson?” Mr Nevin asked again…

Now everyone was looking at me. 

I wanted to curl up and die. It wasn’t Mr Nevin’s fault. He was just a substitute reading his way through the roll call. 

It wasn’t his fault that my dad and my grandma had sent an email to the school requesting my name be changed from ‘Ella’ to ‘Errol’. 

It wasn’t his fault that — if an email even had been sent countering the first email’s name change — that the busy office staff hadn’t got around to updating the system yet. Or that these roll call sheets were printed on a Monday morning, I don’t even know anymore. 

But what I do know is that — at the very second Jessie held the two inverted cruci-boob-les up to my chest — an impatient Mr Nevin repeated his question for the final time. 

“Look, is there an Errol Stevenson here, or isn’t there?”