Toe Stops

A story set in the hellscape that is middle school.

Eighth grade. The worst year of my life so far. It’s my last week, though, and it goes like this.

Monday

I’m sitting at the back of my Language Arts class, tracing the unicorn’s feathers on my Lisa Frank trapper keeper with a ballpoint pen. The teacher is making everyone read their book reports out loud. Because I have already read all of the books on the Eighth Grade reading list, my report is on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The desk next to mine is empty because the girl who sits there, Nyesha, is standing at the front of the class, reading her report. Across the empty space, there’s Zach. I glance over my shoulder at him. When he returns my gaze I look away. Zach was my boyfriend over the summer. He waited until school let out to ask me to be his girlfriend, and right before school started again we broke up. He told everyone that nothing happened between us. I know why he lied about us; his popularity was at stake. A joke, since he’s never had any. And neither have I.

The most popular girl in school is Kia, a petite Hmong girl whose beauty radiates through her acne. Her three-foot mane of ebony hair sways when she walks. Zach asked Kia out twice this year, once in front of half the class. Kia turned him down both times. Kia and I will both be at Newcrest High next year. We’re friends; she’s popular but she’s not a bitch. It’s an unspoken truth that the meanest kids are the unpopular ones. She’s sitting up front next to Holly.

Holly has a square face and glasses and wears her hair in a short bob. She’s always grinning with her nostrils flared, and whispering about people, her sentences punctuated by breathy giggles. Holly and I both went to a different school before we transferred to this one. She transferred in fourth grade and I came the year after. By the time I got here, she had managed to get in with the popular clique, and seemed determined to make sure I stayed on the outer edge of it.

Nyesha returns to her seat. I like her. She laughs at everything I say and listens to people when they talk. She doesn’t simper or flip her hair with a pencil or speak in stage whispers. Her black braids are tied with aqua-blue beads that click softly when she laughs.

“You’re up, Grace,” the teacher says, and I slowly make my way to the front of the classroom.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream is William Shakespeare’s finest comedy,” I read. I glance at the teacher and she responds with a nod. “The plot is complex, with stories that intersect. Hermia loves Lysander, and Helena loves Demetrius, but Demetrius loves Hermia.” Someone giggles when I say ‘Hermia’. “So Oberon, king of the fairies, orders another fairy named Puck to put a spell on Demetrius to make him fall in love with poor Helena, but Puck puts the spell on Lysander instead. Lysander falls in love with Helena.” I pause to scan the room. Nobody’s looking at me except for Nyesha and Kia. Everyone else is staring at the doodles that they’re scratching into their desks or out at the sun-haloed treetops.

Holly whispers something to the girl next to her, her giggles punching holes in the air. She tosses a sideways glance at me.

I put my paper down. “Basically, everyone in the play acts like middle school morons until Puck finally corrects his mistake and all the right people fall in love with each other. Yippy. The end.” I shuffle back to my seat and cross my arms over my chest. Nyesha slips me a note.

Who you mad at? The note asks.

Tuesday

At lunch, I pass the “unpopular” table where I used to sit with Jane and Noreen. Noreen’s un-scrubbed skin has a film of greenish-black dirt. She raises lice in her moldy-straw hair, and has teeth like a derailed train. Her clothes are ripped and stained with whatever fluids end up on her bathroom floor. Her mom never cleans their house; there are splotches of spaghetti sauce on the walls, kitty litter on the kitchen floor, and covens of fruit flies in the oven and fridge.

Jane wears combat boots and black lipstick. She’s dyed her hair so many times it’s permanently olive green. She introduced me to Mallrats and Marilyn Manson, and even though she has the voice of a wet cat, she constantly hums songs from the soundtrack to RENT. We used to sit in her attic bedroom, talking about how much we hated everyone at school, and cooking up ways to subvert her parents. But she didn’t get into Newcrest High like I did. And then she started telling everyone I had multiple personalities. I didn’t know who died and made her Frasier Crane, but I wasn’t crazy about her new habit of putting weird labels on people just because she read one psychology book. I knew that when I moved to Kia’s table that it would close the book on us.

I sit with Kia and Rachel because we’re in the same math group, just the three of us. I told Rachel once that I was surprised nobody minded when I sat at their table. “Oh, it’s fine,” she said. “You’re fine. On the other hand, if Noreen or Jane came and sat here, that would so not be fine.”

Kia, Rachel and I sit at one end, while Kia’s friends fill out the middle. Holly sits at the opposite end, smirking.

As I bite into my mushy tuna sandwich, I remember sitting at this same table in fifth grade, when Holly was new and I was newer. Holly sat across the table from me and whispered to the girl next to her, her hot breath making condensation on the girl’s ear while her eyes skewed toward me, a scene that has repeated itself in every setting in school—on the playground, in the library, in class. It’s not enough for her to talk shit—she needs me to be in earshot.

The bell rings, signaling the end of the lunch period, which means it’s time for recess.

“Grace is gay!” Zach shouts as I pass his table. I flip him off and ignore the admonishments of the lunch aide as I exit the cafeteria.

On the playground, I sit on the asphalt near the fence and watch the traffic on University Avenue. The chain link makes diamond patterns on my legs. A few feet away, Jenny and Suzy are discussing Friday’s field trip to the roller rink.

“Who do you want to skate with?” Jenny asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe Zach?” Suzy replies, and they both laugh. Zach is standing under the basketball hoop with the rest of the unpopular boys. He’s playing air guitar. Suzy imitates him, headbanging with her tongue lolling out.

I hear the scratch of gravel and look up as Kia sits next to me. “What’s wrong, Grace?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say. She doesn’t believe me. “Really,” I say, “I’m fine. I’m just sitting here. Can’t a person just sit?”

Kia smiles, her mouth a valentine. She really is pretty.

Wednesday

It’s bright when I get off the bus in the morning. As my eyes adjust from exiting the sunlight, the hallway seems dark. Sometimes in my dreams, I wander the halls, but nothing ever looks the same. The stairwells are narrower, the corridors are longer, and there are never any windows. From the outside, the school resembles an office tower.

I have dreams like this about my neighborhood too: on the streets, I pass houses that don’t exist, and in the corner diner all the chairs are wrong.

These are the worst kinds of dreams; you know that these things are out of place, but you have no choice but to walk past the red house that’s green in real life or sit in those wrong chairs until the dream fades. You just have to play along.

I run into Noreen outside of Mr. Harrison’s class. She’s pissed at Jane. It’s not anything new—Noreen and Jane used to fight all the time while I watched from the sidelines. Jane once dug her thumbnail into the back of Noreen’s hand until it left a tiny, red half-moon shape.

Now that Jane and I aren’t really talking anymore, Noreen and I have sort of bonded over it. Noreen puts her arm around my shoulders and I let her, but I lean away, careful not to let her hair touch mine. I don’t want to get lice from her again.

The bell rings, and I take my place at the back table with Kia. We open our math books.

“Who are you going to skate with on Friday?” Kia asks as we solve equations.

I pretend not to hear. Kia’s boyfriend is a seventh grader. He’s tall and blonde, a future college football star.

“Come on, Grace,” she says, nudging me.

“I’m not going to fall,” I mutter, “I can skate by myself.”

She leans over and whispers, “You should skate with Zach.”

I glare at her.

She insists: “He knows what Holly said isn’t true.”

“He wouldn’t skate with me even if she hadn’t said that. Besides, I don’t want to skate with him anyway. What did you get for number four?”

She shows me her answer. Kia’s answer is thirty, while mine is seven. I look at my work and realize I forgot the parentheses.

At home, I search the top shelf of my closet for my skates. My skates are plain white with orange wheels. They belonged to my grandmother. Other kids laugh at me when I wear them because they assume I’m jealous of their Rollerblades with neon wheels, but I’m not. I found them last winter as I helped my grandmother move her Christmas ornaments out of the attic. As I laced up, she showed me old photos from her roller derby days. I skated circles in her basement until spring. Besides, I didn’t have to beg my parents to buy me expensive Rollerblades or babysit bratty neighborhood children to earn money for them.

As I reach for the skates, something falls to the floor. I pick it up. It’s a note that Zach passed to me last year, containing the lyrics of a song he’d written.

“You’re my strawberry of love,” he wrote. “I found you in a ruby field.”

A song he wrote for me. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old boy, but also kind of stupid.

He repeated these words to me when he kissed me in the park, behind the softball field in the shade of the backstop. The grass was cool against the small of my back as he slid his hand up my shirt.

I tuck the note back into the closet where I found it.

Thursday

In the gym, Holly and Suzy pretend to stretch.

“Grace is sort of weird, huh?” Suzy says.

“What do you mean, sort of?” Holly asks. And they both laugh.

I remember a similar incident from fight grade. Some bratty kid: Was Grace that weird at your other school? Holly: Weirder. She used to hang around in the bathroom to try and see girls in their underwear. And once, she threw up all over the classroom. (Only the second part of that was true. I’d had a virus.) That day in fifth grade, I was sitting just a table away from her, and all I could do was cry.

Today, I want to hit her. I mean, it’s not like they can suspend me, right? One more day and I’m done with this hellhole forever.

At lunch, I turn around because I don’t want to watch Kia nuzzle her boyfriend, and I catch Zach staring at me. He looks away as soon as my eyes meet his, so I get up and walk over to his table. Zach’s friends slide away from me as I press my palms flat against the table.

“What do you want?” I ask him.

He glares at me. “Shut up,” he spits.

I continue my interrogation. “Why were you staring at me?”

“Who would stare at your ugly ass?”

The boys are whispering, and I hear one of them croak, loud enough for me to hear: “Carpet muncher!”

Zach glances at me, panic shimmering in his eyes.

I slide my palms across the table until I’m on my hands and knees on top of the table. I kiss Zach hard on the mouth. I feel his lips soften and press back. His lips are warm. They part slightly and I feel the tip of his tongue tickle the inside of my lip.

After I pull away, a mask of disgust contorts his face and he makes a big show of wiping his mouth. The other boys are all grimacing and groaning like they’re about to barf. I turn around. Holly’s eyes slice at me. She smirks.

On the playground, I find a corner and sink against the wall. Tears cut trails through the terrain of my cheeks and I don’t even bother to hide my face. Without saying a word, Noreen sits down next to me and puts her arm around my neck. She rests her chin on my shoulder. I don’t lean away this time.

I breathe in Noreen’s perfume of deodorant-sweetened cat piss and watch the traffic on University Avenue. From around the corner, I can hear Holly’s laugh, echoing.

About a month ago, I ran into Zach after school at a convenience store. He tapped me on the shoulder as I squeezed the lemons in the mostly empty fruit bin. He was buying Cheetos and Surge.

“I wish you weren’t going to Newcrest next year,” he said. “Come to Wakefield instead.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked.

He looked at his feet. “Because if you go to Newcrest, we won’t be together,” he murmured, and then quickly added: “at school.”

He raised his eyes to mine, his cerulean irises like rough-cut topaz.

“We’re together at school now,” I said softly. He brushed the hair away from my face, his fingers grazing the back of my neck.

“You’re right,” he whispered and gave my cheek a soft, lingering kiss.

But the next day at school, he wouldn’t even look at me. When I tried to get close enough to ask what the fuck was going on, he skittered away and said something about me being fat, hairy and ugly loudly enough for everyone in the hallway to hear.

It was Holly who finally filled me in. I could see all the muscles in her mouth straining to keep her face from breaking into a wide grin.

“He doesn’t want to come near you because he heard that you were gay.” Her lips trembled. The fluorescent lights reflected in her glasses.

“What?”

“He thinks you’re a lesbian—with Noreen!” Her restraint snapped and her jaw dropped.

“Why does he think that?” I demanded, but she was too busy shrieking, the giggles tumbling out of her like the day when a shelf in the gym collapsed and basketballs went bouncing everywhere.

Now, as I sit on the playground in the shadows of the chain link, I replay that conversation in my mind and imagine knocking Holly to the ground.

Friday

We board the bus that will take us to the roller rink. Nyesha sits next to me. Today, her beads are red, yellow and orange. She chats with someone across the aisle, while at the back of the bus, Zach imitates the Australian lead singer of Silverchair until one of Kia’s friends tells him to shut up. I can’t help but blush. Zach knows that song is my favorite.

From the outside, the roller rink looks like a hangar. The asphalt in the parking lot is cracked and weedy. The sun is hot. Inside, the building is dark except for the patches of colored light that spin out from the disco ball and splatter the walls. I lace up my skates.

I circle the outer edge of the rink, pretending that it’s a track and that I’m racing. Kia skates closer to the center, hand in hand with her boyfriend. Kia has big ambitions. She talks about going to Harvard and becoming a doctor – she dreams of proving that though she’s from an impoverished, immigrant family, she can do anything. I hope some guy doesn’t fuck all that up for her.

Jane and Noreen aren’t skating. Instead, they’re sitting at the tables near the snack bar eating pretzels with orange liquid cheese and making jokes about everyone who’s on the rink. I guess they’re friends again. I wonder when that happened.

Zach and his friends perform tricks that result in them faceplanting on the rink until the deejay cuts the music and tells them that if they do that one more time, they’re out. Now they skate peacefully, playing air guitar and headbanging whenever a rock song interrupts the flow of Hip-hop and R&B.

I skate hard. I lap everyone on the rink. My calf muscles tighten, and I lap them again.

The Silverchair song that Zach sang on the bus floods the room. I look over and Zach is skating next to me. For a second, we lock eyes. His fingers brush my hand.

Suddenly, a glaze of terror coats his eyes and he pulls his hand away like he’s touched something sticky. He races away, weaving in between other skaters. Holly comes up from behind, taking his place. She says something to me, but I don’t hear the words. All I hear is the glint in her eye, the wide grin, the giggle.

The friction caused by the grinding of my teeth results in a dull pain as my jaw tightens. Sweat drips into my eyes. I bend my knees.

As Holly passes me, I push off on my toe stops and lunge at her, grabbing the waistband of her jeans with clenched fists. We both go flying.