Heartbeat

Sometimes life just isn’t fair. Sometimes certain people are favored by whoever leads us all. That’s not to say some people don’t get their fair share of luck, some just have more than others.

My legs and feet hang over the edge of the new metal dock and the refreshingly icy cold water overcomes my wriggling toes as they send ripple after ripple through the water of Oaknut Lake. I guide my hand into the sand, searching for the perfect palm-sized stone, while my drifting hazel eyes gaze at the ever growing circles of disturbance. One hand pushes the sleeve up of the other and the smooth brown stone ends its short time in the air as it’s chucked into the water. Skipping stones isn’t one of my greatest talents. This one doesn’t get much farther than one thrown around one year ago, towards the beginning of my sixth grade year, where my story begins.

Shoot. I could see it now on my report card: Allison Young is a great student, but she was late for the first day of school. As long as there was something I could do about it, that wouldn’t happen. With this mental picture propelling me, I threw a dirty pink bulging bag over my shoulder and raced to the bus stop, cursing all things pink and the first day of school supplies weighing me down.

Just as I was rounding the corner, the big yellow monster was pulling up. My feet skidded to a stop along with new muddy brown convertibles, a backpack that was ‘accidentally’ soaked with brown stuff that suspiciously resembled mud, and not so new running sneakers from the company that produces “shoes that breathe.” The eighth graders boarding the bus with me probably weighed about as much as all the junk I was lugging around with me now. Fifteen rows of empty seats showed themselves before me in all their hideous smelly glory, and I picked the fourth from the front feeling that my fate could be hanging in the balance. One of my friends from Nox Elementary sat down next to me at the second stop. Jamie was her name, and she was a slightly crazed (but fun), tall, straight-haired brunette girl who had been a friend of mine since second grade. I had always envied her with my short and hard to manage brown curls, and she had never really been one of my best friends, but that’s a lot better than sitting next to some bulky eighth grader you don’t know.

Our seat also collected Flaire, a blond girl who liked to cake makeup on her face and wear long flowing skirts, and she kind of reminded me of an onion. It’s not that Flaire looked or smelled like one of these vegetables, but her personality was around the same as an onion’s. If combined with other sweet and sour friends she was great to have, but alone she could drive you to tears with insanity. Uncountable backpacks lurched forward as the bus became stationary and faces, new and old, began to stand up. I just clasped my hands and desperately wished for a good year.

The sand feels oddly smooth as my clumsy fingers begin fumbling for another skipping stone. One finger slipping into the water and feeling some green water plants, the green slimy dots and watery pinecone feel reminding me faintly of duckweed and elodea. Underneath my hand clenches a stone and steals it from its place in the water. It’s green.

Green is a very interesting color. Green can stand for moss growing in the recesses of a cave. Green can stand for plant life, for a field of grass, even as a sign to proceed upon a traffic light. This was just green. Marker green, flower stem green, evergreen green, it was green.

The green resting in my palm is thrown, unsuccessfully, adding to the disturbance of the already rippling water.

Chris Shelley’s eyes were shining, captivating, green. It was a miracle that he was in section A of Webster Middle School, but having him in my homeroom seemed too good to be true. As it turned out, it was.

“Tori and Allison, you guys are like the only people I know in our homeroom!” Chris yelled to Tori and me over the rest of the sixth grade.

“I know!” Tori and I screamed back to Chris in unison. We stole a glance at each other. Wow. Tori had gotten a haircut over the summer.

“Everyone else from Nox seems to be in Mr. Topon’s class!”

This was definitely true. Laura, my best friend, also from Nox, was in Mr. Topon’s class along with two people I had just met from Klapper Elementary, Nika and Shila. The only person I really knew in section A that was in Ms. Lorace’s class was Haley from Nox.

Our homeroom teachers marched us up the thousands of staircases that seemed a torturing walk of death with our school supplies. At this point I was starting to wonder if we were actually going to use these school supplies or if they were just some cruel joke. It seemed other people were starting to wonder that too. Almost everyone packing the staircase seemed to be lagging due to all the extra weight. All of us making it us the stairs safely was a miracle by itself, but having everyone make it where they were supposed to be was purely magic.

After making it all the way up the stairs and about to be assigned my seat, I realized something I wish I hadn’t. My Farming 1800 bag with all five of my binders was still in the cafeteria. I threw my backpack down and tore back towards my 1800s bag. This had probably not been a very good first impression on Mr. Wald.

The bag was in my hand and I started to section A. Which side of the staircase? Left or right? Sure. Let’s go with left. My legs accelerated and through my brilliant left or right technique, I made it back to homeroom.

Angry eyes glaring at you is usually a bad thing, but angry eyes glaring at you and restrained laughter is worse. “I’m back?” I stammered to Mr. Wald and the rest of the class. Everyone’s eyes were glittering. “What might your name be?”

“Allison.”

“Okay Allison, where would you like to sit?”

I pretended to take my time thinking, there was only one table left.

“I’ll take the one in the corner,” I replied to this trick question, my outstretched arm signifying where I desired. Everyone laughed.

Chris smiled. Next to me was Walter, a super smart French kid who was taking calculus in sixth grade but didn’t know how to do a factorization tree (reminding me of my annoying brother). Across from me sat Collie, a girl with super light skin that loved everything pink. On the other side of the table was Sally, a girl on the cheerleading squad who also loved pink, loved style even more, and Walter already drove her crazy. At least we had something in common.

On that day, most of my time was spent daydreaming. I went to art, I went to gym, daydreaming. Matching schedules with Laura, it happened that our schedules were the same except for the fact that we had different Spanish teachers.

Our homeroom time approached, more daydreaming.

“I can’t believe I’m in his class,” my hushed voice whispered to Laura, who had just emerged from Mr. Topon’s room. Laura, of course, knew I liked Chris.

“I’m happy for you too, but I wish we were in the same class,” her voice replied as she stuffed her reading glasses back into their case.

“Me too. Just looking at the best,” the bell rang as soon as my words started to echo into the hallway. “See ya tomorrow!”

Starting that year, I was going to go to WED, Webster Extended Day. As it happens, Chris was too. At WED, you have half an hour to play, an hour to do homework, then the option of staying in the cafeteria or going to the gym to play a game. Last year, at Nox, I’d gone to NED (Nox Extended Day) once and loved it. We had gone up to the gym to play GaGa, which had then instantly become my favorite game. The instructions were simple, if the ball hits you below your knees, you are out. Of course, there are other rules like no double touches and if you hit the ball out of the designated GaGa area you are out, but when playing GaGa, keep the ball away from your foot. Once that day I might have won, but I double touched, making Chris the victor.

On that first day of sixth grade, Chris was wearing a green Webster Expedition sweatshirt. He wore sweatshirts every day, one of his signature traits. The dark green sweatshirt matched the whistle that Mrs. Debra blew.

“Attention! It’s homework time! Everyone, come to the front of the cafeteria!” she yelled at everyone in the room. Actually, Mrs. Debra’s supposedly menacing frame was situated in the back of the cafeteria, but I assumed the commander wanted all her cadets to go where she was, so that’s where I went.

The teacher wasn’t exactly a sight for sore eyes. Her eyes were like little white beads protruding from a little brunette head, at least little compared to her short but very large body. An hour began to tick by. Second by second, minute by minute. We had no homework on the first day of school, so I had Ellie, another girl from Nox, teach me how to play Othello. Last year Ellie hadn’t been a best friend, but she was in section A and she went to WED. Like so many others, Ellie was fated to become one of my greatest friends.

“Loser cleans up!” I joked to Ellie as we cleaned up the game.

“Hey, it’s not my fault you’re so much smarter than me, Allison.”

“Stop it.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Iv you wan to go to da gym, line up. We’re playin’ GaGa,” a third voice, the Brazilian Ms. Gantine yelled from the door, crossing her arms across her chest. Saying my farewells to Emma, I raced to the door along with Kay and Gene, who I knew from soccer, Chris, some more sixth graders I did and didn’t know, then some seventh and eighth graders I didn’t recognize at all.

Each and every one of us tramped down the Webster halls into the gym, and people began to set up the game. Even looking back on in now, I still don’t see how everyone at WED learned my name on that first day. Apparently half the people there already knew my name and the other half picked it up fast. If only I could jump that fast. Jumping was something you just had to know, because the middle school kids played GaGa pretty rough. Chris and eighth grade sister Christina were pretty much unstoppable. Second to them was Alex Sander. Once that day I remember Alex spiking the ball and, three seconds later, making contact with my ear.

“Headshot! Isn’t he out for that?” I asked whichever WED teacher would answer my question.

“No, but you are!” Alex replied as the ball was spiked at me again, this time hitting my foot. Stepping out of the arena, I silently cursed whoever had made the rules of GaGa. Chris gave me a sympathetic look. Never mind. I love the person who made these rules.

My hands help my feel lift out of the water as I finish throwing my sixth stone. That time, I wasn’t trying to skip the stone. I was just trying to throw it as far as possible. Sometimes, when you can’t get what you want, you just have to try for something else.

Two weeks later, everyone had settled into the daily routine. Shila and Nika were staring to become pretty good friends with Laura and me. Every day I had the pleasure of staring at the back of Chris’s small blond head as we engaged in class debates. Once I even killed a bee during social studies. There was applause as I flushed and returned to my seat. After that at WED, if I was lucky, I could listen to Shila as she shared with me everything she knew or had learned that day about Chris. Once she even told me that she found one of Chris’s friends annoying because he kept telling her that Chris liked her. Then I’d be able to watch as Shila and Chris played games in their homework group. At that point, my hands would probably be clenched in fists. Something was going on between them, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I had many mottos in sixth grade, most of them I had made up, and almost all of them had a song. Here’s one of my favorites: if the inevitable is really, truly, inevitable, accept it. Push it along if you can. This was matched to Move Along, one of the All American Reject’s greatest hits.

Go ahead as you waste your days with thinking

Mottos weren’t the only things songs went along with. When I wasn’t daydreaming, there was always a song in my head. Even sometimes when I was.

Time passed.

A month or so into the school year, some kids, including Chris, decided to play the card game version of Deal Or No Deal. I decided to join them. A couple people had a turn playing for a chance to win a thousand grand, most of them winning around twenty-five thousand bucks. Then it was Chris’s turn. I matched the money to the cases, putting the million bucks at case number two. It’s my lucky number. As it happened, something clicked between the two of us when Chris picked his case. He picked number two.

Alex peeked and saw the amount of money in the case.

“There is no frikin’ way you picked the million bucks!” he shouted at Chris, shoving the card in his face. “You rigged it!”

“No he didn’t. I put the million bucks on the two because it’s my lucky number,” I retorted.

“Okay, then how did he know the million was on the two? Chris isn’t psychic, this is BS!”

I’d been wondering that too. All eyes turned towards Chris.

“In my mind there was a star over the two, so I picked it,” the victim in question replied.

I believed him. I really believed him.

“He’s telling the truth.”

“Yeah right.”

Chris’s turn was over. After everyone else had left, I asked him why he had chosen two again. I thought I might get a different answer.

“Two is my lucky number.” What a coincidence.

Hands are shaking cold.

These hands are meant to hold

Three days later, I asked Chris if he wanted to play a game. He said no. Ten minutes later he was playing a game with Shila.

The next day, at recess, I decided to ask two questions. First was Shila, with a green sweatshirt marking her waist. “Do you like Chris?”

When all you gotta keep is strong,

“How long have you known?”

“Around a month.”

Move along, move along,

Like I know you do.

My black sneakers were once again soaked with mud from Oaknut Lake. They pounded the pavement as I approached him.

My shoes stopped.

“Hi Allison.”

Even though Chris was a very sporty person, today his dark green eyes were focused on not a ball or a bat, but a sweatshirt fixed around somebody’s waist.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and it’s going to sound really weird, but do you like her?”

There was a pause.

And even when your hope is gone

“Yes.”

“Ask her out.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Move along, move along,

Just to make it through!

It was time for someone else’s sneakers to pound the pavement. Shila looked up, seeing Chris standing in front of her, then she looked at me. I smiled.

I walk across the metal dock, and gaze at a neglected pink lump. It’s thrown over my shoulders and I race against time to the bus stop.

When everything is wrong,

We move along.