After what happened on the bus to school that first day, I decided, I wasn’t riding the bus anymore. However I would instead walk to and from school every single day no matter how bad the weather got. It isn’t really all that far, except there is one fairly busy street to cross. And besides, walking is good for you, right?
After about a week, I started to fall into an after-school routine. I would come home, stop in to see Micah for a snack, then do my homework, write a short letter to one or more of my distant friends, and then I would set off to explore the house. I was careful not to be seen or heard by anyone, so that I wouldn’t get in trouble like I had that first day. I never really found anything scandalous or interesting to write to my friends about. Mostly, I was just learning the layout of my grandparent’s house and I guess that was a good thing. At least I was less likely to get lost again.
On Monday of that second week in hell, I mean Lewiston; I was having a particularly rotten day. During lunch, I’d had another run in with Larry, BB, Fish, and the girl I had heard about. Oh was she a wonderful piece of work and I don’t mean wonderful in a good way. She has jet-black hair that looks, as if it has never seen shampoo or a brush… Ever! She wears black plastic frame eyeglasses, which make her dark doll-like eyes seem larger than normal. And Heaven help us all, she sure does like to show off those oversized, brown, furry, teeth of hers. However, by far her worst trait is the smell that seemed to encompass her like a cloud of green mist. Oh man she absolutely reeks of cigarettes and B.O. all the time. What amazes me is the remarkable fact that Larry, Fish, and BB don’t seem to be affected, or even mind her constant olfactory assault.
Back in Chula Vista I had this friend named Jenny Dueler who was very over weight and hygiene lacking but she was nothing like this girl in Maine. I’m talking black and white difference here!!!
Somehow, I had lucked out to be right in the middle of them in the lunch line, with BB and Bertha, which is the girls’ name, in front of me and Larry and Fish behind me.
“Hey, it’s the California kid I was telling you about!” BB said elbowing Bertha to get her attention.
“Oh, you’re right! He is scrawny!” Bertha said with a belch so loud that she could have woke up old Rip-Van-Winkle.
“If one more person calls me scrawny!” I thought to myself.
I found it ironic, that she was calling me scrawny, when she looked as though she were nothing more than skin, stretched over a wire skeleton.
I happen to noticed a few of the other kids in line were holding their noses, or pulling the front collar of their shirts up over their mouth and noses like old time bandits, to act as makeshift air filters.
She reached out to touch me and instinctively I recoiled.
“Hold still!” she growled at me.
“Drop dead!” I snapped and blew past them before I hurled.
I only had a bologna sandwich on my tray, but I didn’t care. If I had stayed in line any longer, I might have barfed from the horrific odor emanating from that Anorexic walking outhouse.
“Hey California!” Bertha shouted, “Where you going? I wasn’t done talking to you!”
I quickly paid for my sandwich and walked as fast as I could get away with, to the far side of the lunchroom, where I sat and slouched down in hopes, that they couldn’t see me.