Page 22 of Meet Me Back Here

Our old school only went through fifth grade, so we had to switch to a new one this year. Now, some of my friends are in different schools from me, and it just sucks. I didn’t like change when Jenny left, and I still don’t like it now. Thankfully, Forrest and I are still together, or I don’t know what I would do.

There are also new kids who came here from other elementary schools. I don’t know what those schools teach, but some of these kids are mean.

I tried to give it time, like Dad suggested, but the school year is almost over, and I still hate it. Actually, I feel like it just keeps getting worse.

I’ve been hiding in my room since the bus dropped me and Forrest off, but when I hear Mom’s car in the driveway out front, I sneak downstairs and out the side door through the kitchen. I don’t want to talk about my day, and her mom psychicness will know something’s wrong the second she looks at me. I’m not good at hiding how I feel. I don’t usually try to.

I wait until Mom gets out of the car and heads to the front door before I hurry to the treehouse ladder and climb up. I have to time it right to avoid her seeing me from the driveway, and I need to be in the treehouse before she goes to the kitchen, or she’ll see me out the window. And she always goes to the kitchen to put down her purse as soon as she gets home.

There isn’t a sound from above me for the whole climb, so I expect I’ll get to continue my sulking alone, but when I pull myself onto the ledge in front of the door, there’s Forrest. I jump so much when I spot him in the shaded corner that I nearly fall out of the treehouse.

“Jesus, Forrest. You scared me!” I say, continuing to pull myself up and tucking my legs out of sight.

“Sorry,” Forrest says, before tilting his head and looking at me weirdly.

“What?” I ask, hoping he doesn’t have Mom’s all-knowing abilities.

“What happened today?” he asks.

Crap.

“Nothing, why?” I answer, but I think I say it too quickly to be believable.

Forrest narrows his eyes at me.

“Something seemed wrong on the bus. I figured you didn’t want to talk in front of people, so I didn’t ask, but then you didn’t come here. Are you ok?” There’s so much concern in his eyes that I come clean. It felt like I was a balloon about to burst anyway. I don’t like bottling things up.

“It was a bad day,” I admit, an understatement for how I feel. “I’m sorry you’ve been waiting. Have you been up here long?”

“No,” Forrest says. He pulls his lunchbox from his other side and unzips it, digging through way too many icepacks until he finds his prize. A popsicle with two sticks. He unwraps it and holds it out to me so I can take the second stick to separate the halves.

“I’m sorry today was bad,” he says, before tapping the tip of his popsicle against mine, like we’re cheersing.

It’s not quite warm enough to be popsicle weather, but I take a lick anyway. It’s strawberry. Whenever Forrest is the one to bring feel-better popsicles, he always picks strawberry. It’s also kinda melted, and I think Forrest might have fibbed about how long he’s been waiting for me.

Like always, we finish our popsicles in silence, then sit a little longer together, still without talking.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Forrest asks, and there’s no pressure. It’s really my choice.

For once, I consider saying no. Stuff like this makes it feel like Forrest being a boy and me being a girl matters—and I don’t want that. Too much is changing already. But I don’t want keeping secrets from Forrest to be another new thing that happens, so I try to share a little.

“Did you have to run the mile in gym today?” I ask.

Forrest nods. We’ve been doing running in PE for a few years now, but this year they decided to time us for a physical fitness assessment. To say it didn’t go well for me would be an understatement. It seems I’m neither physical nor fit. I start wrapping my shoelace around my finger so I have something to do with my hands.

“It was bad,” I say, remembering how I was the last to finish, by a long time. Before, we’d all just kind of run together and talked and it was fun, but that stopwatch coming out changed everything. Now, it’s a competition. Everybody took off. Everybody but me. My legs were burning, and my side hurt. I bet my face looked like a tomato. “At the end, I was the only person left running, and it felt like everybody was staring at me, but I told myself it was all in my head. You know, like when you trip in the cafeteria, and you think everybody cares, but really nobody does?”

But for once, that wasn’t what happened. Everybody was staring at me. I was holding up the whole class.

“Hallie came back to run with me, holding my hand so I’d keep up,” I say. She’s somebody new this year, but she’s been really nice. “And I think that made it worse. At first, I felt better about being last because at least I wasn’t alone, but then I finished and these other girls were laughing. And… I don’t think I’ve ever felt that bad.”

I look down, remembering the whispering, the way everybody looked at me. They all knew something that I wasn’t a part of. It was cruel, much worse than if they were outwardly mocking something I did. Some pointed, hiding it when I looked at them.

“Mrs. K made them stop, but it didn’t help. When we were getting changed after showers, they started again.” I stop, unable to tell him the rest.

I don’t tell him they said I don’t know how to be a girl because I spend all my time with a boy. I don’t tell him the word they called me. How they said I looked when Hallie held my hand. Like I liked it too much. I don’t tell him Hallie laughed at me too, right along with everybody else.

“Somebody said something about how at least I’d be slow and pretty if I wore makeup,” I finish, blurting the least mean of the comments, but one that stuck. The makeup stuff has come up before, but it usually doesn’t bother me so much because Mom doesn’t wear a lot, so I haven’t really wanted it. Not like today.