Happy Kid! Read online

  “How can you start taking taekwondo in seventh grade?” I asked him, hoping I didn’t sound upset. “You can’t start any sport in seventh grade. It’s too late. You have to already know how to play so you’ll be good enough to make the middle school teams.”

  “Trotts doesn’t have any martial arts teams. We started taking taekwondo at the taekwondo school in the next town this past July,” Ted said. “It doesn’t matter how old you are when you start.You can even start when you’re an adult.The guy who runs the school gives new students a private lesson to show them kicks and stuff, and then you start training in classes with other people on your level. And guess what? Mr. Goldman says we’re big enough and strong enough to train with adults.”

  “We thought taekwondo would be a cool thing to do while we’re waiting for the next Master Lee movie to come out in November. Besides, Holly Cappa takes taekwondo,” Luke confided—to everyone at the table. “If we’re in class together, it will be like going out on a date.”

  Ted rolled his eyes. “Holly Cappa is a high green belt. She won’t even practice with us because we’re three ranks below her. She’s always trying to hang around Chelsea and this high-school girl who are both red belts.”

  “Chelsea Donahue?” I squeaked casually.

  “Yeah. She’s been taking taekwondo for a while. She and Holly started when they were little and moved up to the adult classes when they were big enough. That’s why they’re so far ahead of us,” Luke explained.

  “How often do you have to go to class?” I asked.

  “Two or three times a week,” Ted said.

  “Two or three times a week!” I repeated. “And you still go to Boy Scouts, too? How do you do all that and get your homework done?”

  The bell rang and Luke got up to carry his tray to the trash can. “We don’t have that much. Besides, there are taekwondo classes every night and on Saturday morning. You just go to the ones you can get to.”

  But I can’t get to anything. And if I could get to things, who would I go with? Oh, yeah. That’s right. Nobody!

  The rest of us stood up. Right at that moment, someone grabbed my arm. I turned around and saw Jake.

  He signaled to his two buddies. “We’re off to the bathroom to have a smoke. You wanna come?”

  It was the first invitation I’d had since before I started sixth grade.

  “I have to go to my locker before my next class,” I said.

  “You wussing out?” Jake asked, looking as if he might be beginning to suspect that I was trying to avoid him.

  “No. No,” I assured him. “Maybe another time.”

  My fifth-period class was health and living, and Mrs. Haag from my advisory was my teacher. Health and living isn’t included in State Student Assessment Surveys, so all we had to do for homework was have our parents sign a form stating that it was okay for us to watch sex education videos. This happens every year. My mother not only thinks it’s okay for me to watch sex ed videos, she insists that I see them.

  I’m not sure what happened during sixth period because none of it was in English. Everyone said hola to the teacher because she made us, so for the first time all day I wasn’t the only one sounding like a reject. I had to guess that our homework was to cover our textbook because she gave us the assignment in Spanish.

  You’d think I’d look forward to seventh period, it being the last one of the day. But seventh period was going to be science. Science is always disappointing because it’s never like the stuff you see in science fiction shows.

  When I got to science class, Beth and Jamie were already there. They were all excited because they hadn’t been together since lunch. They had spent the last two periods writing in notebooks they were trading so both girls could read all about what each of them had to say during the last hour and fifty-three minutes of their lives. Not much would be my guess.

  Luke came in right after me, and we took seats across the aisle from each other. Okay, so maybe science wouldn’t be so bad.

  Then Jake arrived.

  He came running over and threw himself into the seat behind me.

  “Say it,” he told me.

  I knew immediately what he was talking about. How could I not know after what had been going on that day? But I didn’t want to say it, and I didn’t want to admit that I knew what he meant because that would be admitting that I’d been doing something unusual that day. Something that he, and maybe everyone else, had noticed. So I tried to act all casual, and I asked him, “Say what?”

  “Hello.”

  “You want me to say hello to you?”

  “Not to me,” he said, as if I were some kind of moron.

  “To her.”

  I looked over at Jamie and Beth, who were now watching us as if they thought we might do something so awful they would have to jump up and run for their lives.

  “Not them, either. Her.”

  He pointed to the teacher.

  I felt this little rush of panic as I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my new science teacher when I came into the room. Then I thought, Since when have you cared about that?

  “It’s too late. She’s busy now. I’d just be bothering her,” I said to Jake.

  “Exactly.” He laughed.

  “I don’t think teachers really like to have people say hello to them. You know, like Mr. Pierce this morning?” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, that was great. Go ahead. Say hello to the old lady up there.”

  A couple of kids overheard that and snickered.

  “Mr. Pierce didn’t even know I was the person who said hello to him this morning. You’re the one he heard when you said hello to him,” I pointed out. “So, uh, why don’t you do it?”

  Jake looked toward the front of the room and started waving his hand. “Hey! You up there! Teacher! Kyle has something he wants to say.”

  All situations that involve Jake end up being at least strange, if not nasty and ugly. But the particularly strange part of that particular strange Jake situation was that if I had thought to say hello to the science teacher when I came into the room, none of what was happening just then would have happened. So in a strange, twisted way, I was to blame for my own problem.

  “Well, what is it?” the teacher said.

  “Nothing. Really. It’s okay to start class,” I answered, desperately trying to move everyone’s attention away from me and on to something else.

  Jake gave me a punch in the middle of the back that made me cry out. I had to remind myself that he was supposed to like me.

  “Okay, okay,” I snapped over my shoulder at him. Then I looked at the teacher and in the most normal voice I could manage said, “Hello, Mrs. Lynch.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” she replied.

  Usually I would have agreed with all the kids in the room who were laughing. There is something very funny about a teacher using the word “ass.” But here’s the thing—it’s only funny when she’s using the word about someone else.

  Of course, she wasn’t using it about Jake. So he laughed and laughed and laughed.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Sweetheart, are you sure things were really that bad?” Mom asked after she got home from work and I told her what had happened on my first day of seventh grade.

  “Ah, let me think . . . yes! Yes, they were that bad!” I exclaimed.

  “Well, uh, you do have that little problem with looking for the worst in every situation. You know, negativity?” Mom said. “And then you get yourself all wound up about it.”

  “I didn’t have to look,” I told her. “People do not like to hear the word ‘hello.’ It leads to nothing but trouble. Since when do I go around saying hello to people, anyway? I don’t know what happened to me. I must have been nervous or something.”

  “That’s true,” Lauren said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse you of being friendly.”

  All of a sudden Mom started to laugh. “I know what happened. It was the book. Happy Kid! Remember? You read
that chapter about great relationships beginning with the word ‘hello.’ And then you used what you’d read in your daily life. That’s wonderful. I’m proud of you.”

  “I didn’t do that,” I objected. “That book’s stupid. I forgot what I read just as soon as I read it.”

  “You gave your grandmother a nice big hello on the phone when she called this morning,” Mom reminded me.

  “That was a joke,” I said. But then I remembered saying hello to my father that morning when I didn’t even have to because he was still asleep.

  “It wasn’t very funny when he was saying hello to everyone on the bus,” Lauren pointed out. “More . . . weird, I’d say.”

  “Well, we are talking about someone who’s terribly out of practice,” Mom admitted. “You can’t expect perfection with the first effort.”

  I stopped working on making covers for my textbooks for a moment and stared into space while I recalled passing on something I’d read in the newspaper to Jamie and Beth the way Mom’s book had suggested. And I thought I remembered complimenting someone on her outfit, too. That had definitely come right out of Happy Kid! I’d never have thought of something like that on my own.

  I turned to my mother. “This is all your fault! None of this would have happened if you hadn’t made me read that stupid book. I had a plan, you know. I was going to be really quiet because nobody notices really quiet kids. Nobody accuses them of things. That was all I wanted this year—to be ignored. But you can’t be really quiet and go around saying hello to everybody you see! You have to do one or the other!”

  “I think it’s a good thing the book ruined that plan of yours. Did you seriously think you’d enjoy being ignored for a whole year?” Mom asked.

  “I’ll never know now, will I?”

  Mom sighed. “Give the book another chance,” she insisted.

  “You probably just did something wrong, anyway,” Lauren said.

  “How can somebody say hello wrong?” I asked her.

  “You tell me. You’re the one who did it.”

  Lauren and I were sitting at the kitchen table with her boyfriend, Jared, who was helping me with the book covers while my mother threw together some dinner. Lauren was sitting with her head on the kitchen table and her eyes closed. She gets pretty bored whenever she’s not the subject of a conversation.

  “You got to eat lunch with Luke,” Mom pointed out. “Why can’t you be happy about being in the same lunch section with him?”

  “Happy about eating lunch with him so I can find out he’s replaced me with Ted Fenton? I don’t think so. They go to taekwondo together, by the way. Am I going to taekwondo? No, I’m not.”

  “You could go if you wanted to,” Mom said eagerly. “It would be terrific for you to do something after school.”

  “I’m already doing something after school. It’s called homework. I can’t go to taekwondo because on top of everything else,” I said, “I’m in accelerated English and social studies again this year.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mom said. “Do you want me to call the guidance office and get you out of them?”

  “No! Why would I want you to do that?”

  “Because you wanted me to get you out of them last year,” Mom replied.

  “That’s because they put me in those classes by mistake last year,” I reminded her.

  “And it’s not a mistake this year?” Lauren asked.

  “How did you get into accelerated classes by mistake?” Jared asked as he finished one of my books and reached for an old paper grocery bag so he could get started on another.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t make the mistake.”

  Lauren very unhelpfully explained. “Kyle actually sat in the classes for three weeks before he realized they were for accelerated students. Doesn’t that suggest he didn’t belong there? Wasn’t that proof that someone had done something terribly, terribly wrong?”

  “Hey, there were a lot of kids in those classes from the other elementary schools in town,” I objected. “How was I supposed to know they were smart?”

  “Didn’t you try to do something when you found out about the mistake?” Jared asked.

  Lauren and I looked at our mother.

  “What was I supposed to do?” Mom asked. “Go to the school and tell them my baby wasn’t smart enough to be in with those kids?”

  “You’re a counselor, Mom. You couldn’t have thought of a better way to put it?” I demanded. “Something not so . . . negative?”

  “I tried.”

  “Yeah, well, not fast enough.” I turned back to Jared. “While we were fighting about it, another week passed. I’d been in those two classes for a month. If I’d dropped them then, I would have been a month behind in the regular classes I picked up. Who knows how long it would have taken me to catch up?”

  “The rest of your life?” Lauren suggested.

  I ignored her and said to Jared, “So there I was, in these two ‘special’ classes, and the only way I could get out of them would be to join two classes that weren’t special but that I was a month behind in, so I’d have to work extra hard to catch up. What was the point? Work hard in one class or work hard in the other.”

  “Wow, talk about irony,” Jared said, nodding his head in appreciation.

  None of Lauren’s other boyfriends ever used words like “irony.” Jared definitely is a step up for our family.

  “Look what I figured out today,” I said, pulling my class schedule out of my pocket. “See the list of classes? You notice how both English and social studies have the letter ‘A’ after them?”

  “Oh, no,” Mom sighed. “It must stand for ‘accelerated.’ I can’t believe we didn’t notice that. How embarrassing.”

  “Why?” Lauren asked. “You never gave it a thought because you never expected Kyle to be dumped in classes for A-kid types. He is a B-minus type, after all.”

  “It doesn’t matter what type you are,” I said as I folded up my schedule. “The people at Trotts stick you in a class somewhere and keep you there. You wait and see. They’re going to put me in A-kid classes next year, too.”

  “Next year you’ll be in eighth grade,” Lauren pointed out, as if I couldn’t work that out for myself. “Instead of accelerated classes, the eighth-grade A-kids at Trotts take ninth-grade classes. I had a great time in ninth grade. We—”

  “You mean they skip a grade?” I broke in, because once Lauren gets started down Memory Lane, she’s sometimes there a long time, reliving every sleepover and trip to the mall.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Jared answered for Lauren. “They don’t actually go to high school themselves. Teachers from the high school walk across the parking lot to teach classes in ninth-grade English, math, science, or social studies to what Lauren calls the A-kids. They take their gym, health and living, and electives with the rest of the eighth grade. But then they won’t have to take ninth-grade English, say, with all the other ninth-graders when they’re really in ninth grade. They’ll take tenth-grade English instead.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” I asked. It seemed kind of complicated to me, and for what?

  “They do it so that they’ll finish taking required courses a year or two before they graduate. Then they’ll have time to take more advanced-placement college-level classes than the other kids will have time for.” Jared grinned. “I’m taking precalculus this year, myself.”

  “College-level classes!” I repeated. “I don’t want to take college-level classes! I don’t want to take precalculus!”

  “Don’t worry,” Lauren assured me. “With the grades you get in math, you’re never getting near a precalc course.”

  “Kyle, stop worrying. You don’t have to think about taking college-level courses for years,” Mom said. “And while math may not be your subject, your grades in your accelerated classes have been just fine. The problem is how hard you had to work to get them.”

  Mom was right. My last two years of high school were ages away. In the meant
ime, I’d decided I wanted to stay with the A-kids.

  “It doesn’t matter how hard I have to work,” I told her. “I’ve got to stay in those accelerated classes now. I don’t want people to think I can’t stay in them.”

  I particularly didn’t want Chelsea Donahue to think I couldn’t stay in an A-kid class. Chelsea Donahue, who was smart and athletic and really good-looking. Someday, if we got a chance to talk, I hoped I could make her understand that it was just a big foul-up when she saw me walking with a state trooper in the school lobby back in June. And then we would hold hands and walk to all our classes together. My whole life would become better. Great, in fact. But it would never happen if I didn’t stay in A-kid English and social studies.

  Not that I could say anything about Chelsea to my mother and sister. You really have to be careful about telling family members anything important. They’re always going to be around, and you never know when they’ll remind you of stuff you’d really rather not think about—like how back in seventh grade you liked Chelsea Donahue, who was too smart and too good-looking for you.

  “Besides,” I added, wanting to make sure they didn’t suspect anything, “A-kid English and social studies are the only places I can be rid of Jake. No one is going to mistake him for an A-kid.”

  Once we finished with my textbook covers, I went back to my room to get a little more homework done before dinner. I’d already done the SSASie review sheets for math and social studies. I didn’t have any for science. Mrs. Lynch wasn’t giving us any review work because she said she wasn’t going to risk having anyone accuse her of helping a student cheat. I’d only known her for less than an hour, but I didn’t think she had to worry about anyone accusing her of helping a student do anything.